blasphemies of that which has already degraded the world's Redeemer into the patron saint of insurrection, and the father of infidel fraternity. Poor Lamartine! Is this the man, my Basil, whom you once likened to Chateaubriand? _Quantum mutatus!_ I knew him, till lately, only as a poet and a traveller. He certainly went to Palestine with the spirit of a palmer. He bathed in Siloa with enthusiasm, and almost expired of feeling under the venerable olive-trees of Gethsemane. How Frenchy--how intensely French! mass in the morning, and weeping and sighing,--a revel before nightfall, and desperate gaming. And this man to be the Cromwell of the commonwealth? He could hardly have been the Milton, though it would have been more becoming. And what will be his career? It is a pity Lady Hester Stanhope was not permitted to consult his stars in full when he met her on Mount Lebanon, when she praised his handsome foot and arched instep, and told him he should be very important in the history of the world. Ah, how certainly he will yet lament, if he does not lament already, the fulfilment of the oracle! Such weird sisters as Lady Hester generally tell _only half_, leaving the rest to imagination and to time. But whether this Phaeton, who has grasped the reins, is to set the world on fire; whether he, in turn, is only to try the game of Humpty-Dumpty and to fall; or whether, even as I write this, he be not already under the foot of Louis Blanc and his _Communistes_,--what probabilities or improbabilities shall aid my conjecture? This thing only will I venture as my surmise, though not my hope, that kings shall reign again in France, as if Lamartine never lived: that tricoloured cockades shall be made no more, and lilies be cultivated again: that there will soon be longings for a sight of the _drapeau blanc_, and a prince of the sons of St Louis: and that, fat as he is, and Bourbon as he is, and half Austrian as he has made himself, Henry Duke of Bordeaux will soon be known as HENRI LE DÉSIRÉ. Yours ever, my dear Basil, ERNEST. THE CAXTONS--PART IV. CHAPTER IX. I was always an early riser. Happy the man who is! Every morning, day comes to him with a virgin's love, full of bloom, and purity, and freshness. The youth of nature is contagious, like the gladness of a happy child. I doubt if any man can be called 'old' so long as he is an early riser, and an early _walker_. And oh, youth!--take my word of it,--youth in dressing-gown and slippers, dawdling over breakfast at noon, is a very decrepid ghastly image of that youth which sees the sun blush over the mountains, and the dews sparkle upon blossoming hedgerows.