guidance of posterity, the obscure process by which certain conditions produce certain effects. But where a war has been caused by the caprice and unreasoning anger of a potentate, it is beside the purpose to trace up to his very cradle the effect of early mismanagement or neglect in rendering him passionate or capricious, for no political lesson can be taught where results cannot be calculated. In such a case it will be sufficient to state the fact, that the war originated in the irascible temper and unaccountable impulse of one who had the power to give his anger such tremendous vent. It would be absurd to pause in the history, and to introduce his biography, merely to prove that it is a bad thing when great power is lodged in the hands of a person who is the slave of violent caprice. And in the present instance, if it had been stated in two sentences that the conditions under which the French Empire had started into existence were such as to render a foreign war, or a commanding position in Europe, necessary to its stability, the statement would have fully satisfied the requirements of history, and would have received general assent. However, having considered it necessary to prove this proposition by a separate history of the transition which France underwent from a republic to an empire, Mr Kinglake undertakes to show how we were dragged into war by this necessitous Emperor. He asserts many times that the operations of the French and English fleets caused the war. “The English Government,” he says, “consented to engage in naval movements which affected—nay governed—the war.” And again, “The French Emperor had no sooner engaged the English Government in a separate understanding, than he began to insist upon the necessity of using the naval power of France and England in the way which he proposed—a way bitterly offensive to Russia. Having at length succeeded in forcing this measure upon England, he after a while pressed upon her another movement of the fleets still more hostile than the first, and again he succeeded in bringing the English Government to yield to him. Again, and still once again, he did the like, always in the end bringing England to adopt his hostile measures; and he never desisted from this course of action, until at last it had effected a virtual rupture between the Czar and the Western Powers.” And in this way throughout these transactions the Emperor plays a part much the same as that which Satan took in the scenes in Paradise; and at every turn we see him moving deviously, quite serpentine in craft and baseness, or squatting toad-like at the ear of the slumbering British Government, till now, at the Ithuriel touch of history, he starts up in his true form of malignant demon. The various items of the present charge against him are collected by Mr Kinglake in a compendious form:—