There he published, in 1814, the pithy _Essai sur le principe générateur des Constitutions_, in which he reduced to an abstract form the doctrines of his former treatise on France. His style is peculiarly relishable, sometimes even sportive; but its main maxims are laid down with a dictatorial dignity and sternness, which associate the tractate, in the minds of many, with the writings of Montesquieu. This essay, so little known in England, has found an able translator and editor in America, who commends it to his countrymen as an antidote to those interpretations which are put upon our constitutional law by the political disciples of Rousseau. I commend the simple fact to your consideration, as a sign of the more earnest tone of thinking, on such matters, which is beginning to be felt among us. The fault of the essay is its practical part, or those applications into which his growing Ultramontanism diverted his sound theories. His principles are often capable of being turned upon himself, as I have noticed in the matter of creeds. His genius also found a congenial amusement in translating Plutarch's _Delays of Divine Justice_, which he accompanied with learned notes, illustrating the influence of Christianity upon a heathen mind. On his return from St Petersburg in 1817, appeared his violent Ultramontane work, _Du Pape_, in which he most ingeniously, but very sophistically, uses in support of the papacy an elaborate argument, drawn from the good which an overruling Providence has accomplished, by the very usurpations and tyrannies of the Roman See. As if this were not enough, however, he closes his life and labours with another work, the _Soirées de St Petersbourg_, in which, with bewitching eloquence, he expends all his powers of varied learning, and pointed sarcasm, and splendid sophistry, upon questions which have but the one point of turning everything to the account of his grand theory of church and state. Thus, from first to last, he identifies his political and moral philosophy with religious dogmas essentially ruinous to liberty, and which, during three centuries, have wasted every kingdom in which they have gained ascendency. To the direct purpose of uprooting the little that remained of Gallicanism, he devoted a treatise, which accompanies his work _Du Pape_, and of which the first book is entitled, _De l'Esprit d'opposition nourri en France contre le Saint-Siège_. Its points may be stated in a simple sentence from the works of his coadjutor, Frederick Schlegel, who, in a few words, gives the theory which has been the great mistake of the Reaction. "The disguised half-schism of the Gallican church," says he,--"_not less fatal in its historical effects than the open schism of the Greeks_--has contributed very materially towards the decline of religion in France, down to the period of the Restoration."[7] He illustrates it by the disputes of Louis XIV. with the court of Rome, but forgets to say