"The house of Bourbon was placed in Paris at the Restoration as a trophy of the European confederation. The return of the ancient princes was inseparably associated, in the public mind, with the cession of extensive provinces, with the payment of an immense tribute, with the occupation of the kingdom by hostile armies, with the emptiness of those niches in which the gods of Athens and Rome had been the objects of a new idolatry, with the nakedness of those walls on which the Transfiguration had shone with a light as glorious as that which overhung Mount Thabor. They came back to a land in which they could recognise nothing. The Seven Sleepers of the legend, who closed their eyes when the Pagans were persecuting the Christians, and woke when the Christians were persecuting the Pagans, did not find themselves in a world more completely new to them. Twenty years had done the work of twenty generations. Events had come thick; men had lived fast. The old institutions and the old feelings had been torn up by the roots. There was a new church founded and endowed by the usurper; a new nobility, whose titles were taken from the fields of battle, disastrous to the ancient line; a new chivalry, whose crosses had been won by exploits which seemed likely to make the banishment of the Emigrants perpetual; a new code, administered by a new magistracy; a new body of proprietors, holding the soil by a new tenure; the most ancient local distinctions effaced, the most familiar names obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy, a Brittany, or a Guienne. The France of Louis XVI. had passed away as completely as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite curiosity; but it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the depths of primeval strata. The revolution in the laws and the form of government was but an outward sign of that mightier revolution which had taken place in the minds and hearts of men, and which affected every transaction and feeling of life. It was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the feudal system, as that our globe could be overrun by mammoths. Louis might efface the initials of the Emperor, but he could not turn his eyes without seeing some object which reminded him he was a stranger in the palace of his fathers."[4] [4] MACAULAY'S _Essays_, ii. 230.