Granted that the army, the instrument employed by the President, disgraced itself by an indiscriminate and unprovoked slaughter—that the opposition of political adversaries was silenced in a very arbitrary fashion—that a foreign war would probably be necessary for the security of the new dynasty,—yet will it be said that a result which has tranquillised France, which has developed her resources and exalted her reputation, leaves in the establishment of the Empire nothing except what the world must regret and condemn? And looking at the portrait which Mr Kinglake has drawn, with so bold and incisive a touch, of this potentate of wooden face, base soul, and feeble resolve, who turns green in moments of danger—who, with the aid of swindlers and bravoes, has yoked France to his chariot, and drives it in a career of blood with the great Powers of Europe bound to its wheels—we ask, not only is it brilliant as a work of art, but is it like the original? We do not profess to believe that the Empire is the perfection of government. We do not maintain that Louis Napoleon is a model of virtue and disinterested policy. But if his place in Europe were suddenly vacant, will Mr Kinglake tell us how it would be better filled, or what precious things might not be thrown into the gulf before it could be closed? And if no answer can be given to the question, we may well doubt the expediency of contributing to bring so important a personage and so powerful an ally into contempt. “After the 2d December in the year 1851,” says Mr Kinglake, in concluding the portion of his work relating to the _coup d’état_, “the foreign policy of France was used for a prop to prop the throne which Morny and his friends had built up.... Therefore, although I have dwelt awhile upon a singular passage in the domestic history of France, I have not digressed.” Now, even if he could prove the necessities of the French Empire to have been the main motive of the part England took in the war, we should still dispute this. No doubt it is the business of the historian of an important series of events to trace them to their sources, and the more clearly he can show the connection hidden from ordinary minds, the more sagacious and ingenious he will appear. But if there were no limit to this, the history of any event might spread to an extent altogether boundless; and therefore, to justify digression, it is necessary for the historian to show that the incidents which led to the result had a necessary and not an accidental influence in procuring it. For instance, in the case of a popular uprising against a despotism or a superstition, it would be expected that the historian should trace all the successive steps by which the national feelings were roused from suffering to resistance, because those steps led inevitably and naturally to that particular result, and not to any other. In such a case history is performing her proper function of explaining, for the