Singular was the retribution which awaited France. The “Ulysses” of Europe, as he has been styled—the old, crafty, insincere, penurious, yet plausible and half-sagacious man, sate in apparent peace upon his throne for wellnigh eighteen years, negotiating alliances, maintaining a fair outward character, pandering to popularity, identifying himself with the _bourgeoisie_, and identifying his sons with the army—and all this to fall at last before the worst planned and most poorly contrived insurrection which was ever attempted in the streets of a European capital. Surrounded by his citizens, the citizen king went down. We know now, from the revelations of De la Hodde and others, what was the true nature and commencement of that beggarly conspiracy. We know that a few hundred suspected and ill-organised Socialists, along with a handful of newspaper editors, not two of whom possessed sufficient personal courage to lay hand on a loaded musket, contrived to overawe Paris, to bully the redoubted National Guard, and to send poor old Ulysses again upon his travels, without much chance of finding a second imperial Ithaca. Farce and tragedy are here so closely interwoven that it is wellnigh impossible to separate their texture. The dethronement of such a king may be a grand European disaster, but it militates nothing against the principle or the sanctity of royalty. It was but a simple Presidency gone a-begging. The King of the Bourse or the Railway Monarch had about them nearly as much of that divinity which should surround the royal character as Louis Philippe, the chosen of the shopkeepers, and the veteran dabbler in the funds. No true greatness, no high nobility of soul, elevated him to the throne of France—ignoble beyond all precedent was the manner in which he was compelled to leave it. The retreat of Charles X. was a triumph compared with his panic-stricken and unfollowed flight. The following are Mr Alison’s remarks upon the last of these Revolutions. The reader will not fail to observe the extreme similarity between the two astounding Revolutions, and the precise nature of the cause which enabled both of them to be successfully carried through by an otherwise contemptible rabble. “Who is answerable for this calamitous Revolution, which has thus arrested the internal prosperity of France, involved its finances in apparently hopeless embarrassment, thrown back for probably half a century the progress of real freedom in that country, and perhaps consigned it to a series of internal convulsions, and Europe to the horrors of general war for a very long period? We answer without hesitation, that the responsibility rests with two parties, and two parties only—the King and the National Guard.