In treating of the causes which have led to the revolution of 1848, Lamartine imputes a great deal too much, in our estimation, to individual men or shades of opinion, and too little to general causes, and the ruinous effects of the first great convulsion. He ascribes it to the personal unpopularity of M. Guizot, the selfish and corrupt system of government which the king had established, and the discontent at the national risks incurred by France for the interests only of the Orleans dynasty, in the Montpensier alliance. This tendency arises partly from the constitution of Lamartine's mind, which is poetical and dramatic rather than philosophical; and partly from the disinclination felt by all intelligent liberal writers to ascribe the failure of their measures to their natural and inevitable effects, rather than the errors or crimes of individual men. In this respect, doubtless, he is more consistent and intelligible than M. Thiers, who, in his _History of the French Revolution_, ascribes the whole calamities which occurred to the _inevitable march of events_ in such convulsions--forgetting that he could not in any other way so severely condemn his own principles, and that it is little for the interest of men to embrace a cause which, in that view, necessarily and inevitably leads to ruin. Lamartine, in running into the opposite extreme, and ascribing everything to the misconduct and errors of individual men, is more consistent, because he saves the principle. But he is not the less in error. The general discontent to which he ascribes so much, the universal selfishness and corruption which he justly considers as so alarming, were themselves the result of previous events: they were the effects, not the causes, of political change. And without disputing the influence, to a certain extent, of the individual men to whose agency he ascribes everything, it may safely be affirmed that there are four causes of paramount importance which concurred in bringing about the late French revolution; and which will for a very long period, perhaps for ever, prevent the establishment of anything like real freedom in that country.