But, if this passive position of the old legitimists does not permit them to assume the attitude of a decided _party_, or even of bearing properly such a designation, it must not be supposed that the cause of legitimacy is dead, or even dormant, in France. Far from it. The present state of legitimacy in France, however, must be studied less among the avowed legitimists, who have long given themselves the name, than in the dispersed and floating elements pervading the mass of the nation. The preference of the great majority of the country for monarchical institutions, or, at all events, its strong anti-revolutionary feeling, and aversion to the republican rule, after the sad experience of much misery and misfortune--and from its despair of the realisation of that "hope deferred," in the restoration of confidence and prosperity, which "maketh the heart sick"--are facts which cannot be denied by any man of unprejudiced feelings and sincere convictions. By degrees, then, feelings have been latterly assuming a form favourable to the cause of legitimacy: and that such sentiments now notoriously exist in the hearts of a great proportion of the country at large can scarcely be disputed. They are based, it is true, in no ways, among the mass, upon any political opinions or philosophical principles--they spring up from a desire of having a "something" at the head of the state which may be the type of stability, and thus the representative of confidence, peace, and restored prosperity: and this "something" is best embodied, in the minds of men, in the person of a young prince, who represents the apparently most stable form of monarchical government--that founded on legitimacy. They arise from no personal attachment to the elder branch of the Bourbons, or to the Duke of Bordeaux individually, but solely from a desire to return to monarchical government, and from the growing conviction that, among the many pretenders to the supreme power in France, were a monarchy to be established, the sole one who presents a firmer hope of stability--who represents a principle, and who thus best offers to be pilot to the _terra firma_ of a "promised land" to those who are still tossing hither and thither upon the waves of revolution, with storms eternally menacing a still more complete shipwreck on the horizon--is he who bases his pretensions upon the long-scouted theory of legitimacy. To this form of hoped-for stability, then, men now begin to attach themselves more and more, in their aspirations for the future; and thus legitimist expectations, predilections, sympathies--call them what you will--grow, increase, spread like a banian tree, which still ever plants its dropping branches, and takes root farther and farther still; and they thus implant themselves more and more, on all sides, on the soil of the revolution. We speak here of a great proportion of men _of all classes_ in France. At the same time, it is very clear that a