deep-rooted characteristics of modern burgher manners, timidity of spirit by the side of firm determination, and mob licentiousness accompanied by principles of legality, In a word, all the elements which have concurred in the constitution of European society, and all that that society has been, have now been fully searched into. Now let us transport ourselves into the midst of modern Europe; I do not mean the present Europe, after the astonishing change we have witnessed, but that of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Do we recognise the society we have just beheld in the twelfth? How prodigious the difference! I have already dilated upon this difference when on the subject of the boroughs; I then endeavoured to show how little the third estate of the eighteenth century resembled that of the twelfth? Scrutinising feudalism and the church in the same manner, we are struck by a similar metamorphosis. There was no more resemblance between the nobility of Louis XIV.'s court and the feudal aristocracy, or between the church of Cardinal de Bernis and that of the Abbot Suger, than between the third estate of the eighteenth century and the burghers of the twelfth. In the interval between these two epochs, society (although in possession of all its elements) was completely transformed. I shall attempt a clear explication of the general and essential character of this transformation. From the fifth to the twelfth century, society contained all that I have described--kings, a lay aristocracy, a clergy, burghers, serfs, religious and civil powers, the germs, in fact, of all that constitutes a nation and a government, and yet there was no government or nation. As to a people, properly so called, or a veritable government, in the sense with which those words are now applied, there was nothing of the sort in the whole period mentioned. We have encountered a multitude of particular forces, of special facts and of local institutions, but nothing general or public, no political system, in the strict sense of the word; in fine, no real nationality. Let us look, on the contrary, to Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We behold in every quarter two great forms appear on the stage of the world, the government and the nation. Society is formed by, and history is occupied in the relation of, the action of a general power upon a whole country, and the influence of that country upon the power which governs it; the mutual ties of these two great forces, their alliance and their strife, are the especial objects of history. {141} The nobles, the clergy, the burghers, all those particular classes and powers, have no longer a prominent appearance, but are merged in and effaced by these two great bodies, the government and the nation. This is, if I mistake not, the essential feature which distinguishes modern from primitive Europe, and the metamorphosis was accomplished between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.