Perhaps it could hardly have been otherwise; but it must always be deplored that the Conservatism of England was reproduced on the Continent in connexion with the Christianity of Ultramontanism. The conservatism of de Stael and of Chateaubriand, though repudiated by the _réactionnaires_, is indeed worthy of honourable mention, as their characters will ever be of all admiration; yet it must be owned to be deficient in force, and by no means executive. It was the Conservatism of impulse--the Conservatism of genius, but not the Conservatism of profound philosophy and energetic benevolence. The spirit that breathes in the _Génie du Christianisme_ is always beautiful, and often devout, yet it has been justly censured, as recommending less the truth than the beauty of the religion of Jesus Christ; and though it doubtless did something to reproduce the religious sentiment, it seems to have effected nothing in behalf of religious principle. Its author would have fulfilled a nobler mission had he taught his countrymen, in sober prose, their radical defects in morality, and their absolute lack of a conscience. The Conservatives of the Reaction have at least attempted greater things. They have bluntly told the French nation that they must reform; they have set themselves to produce again the believing spirit: their mistake has been, that they have confounded faith with superstition, and taken the cause of the Jesuits into the cause of their country and their God. Nothing could have been more fatal. It arms against them such characters as Michelet,[5] with his _Priests, Women, and Families_, and makes even Quinet formidable with his lectures on "the Jesuits and Ultramontanism." Yet it must be urged in their behalf, that they have been pardonably foolish, for they drew their error with their mother's milk; and when even faith was ridiculed as credulity, it was an extravagance almost virtuous to rush into superstition. Such is the dilemma of a good man in Continental Europe: his choice lies between the extremes of corrupt faith and philosophic unbelief. This was the misfortune of poor Frederick Schlegel; and, disgusted with the hollow rationalism of Germany, he became a Papist, in order to profess himself a Christian. The mistake was magnanimously made. We cannot but admire the man who eats the book of Roman infallibility, in his hunger for the bread of everlasting life. Even Chateaubriand must claim our sympathies on this ground. Our feelings are with such errorists--our convictions of truth remain unaltered; and we cannot but lament the fatality which has thus attended European Conservatism like its shadow, and exposed it to successful assaults from its foes. I have shown how they use their opportunity. And no wonder, when this substitution of Ultramontanism for Christianity has involved de Maistre in an elaborate defence of the Inquisition--debased the Conservatism of de Bonald to slavish absolutism;[6] and when true to