Under a king so sceptical and voluptuous, so much of a _philosophie_ and _phyrronéste_, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to spread themselves through all ranks of society--to permeate from the very highest to the very lowest classes: and not all the lately acquired asceticism of the monarch, his successor, nor all the efforts of the Jesuits could restrain or control the tendencies of the _étudiants en droit_. What the law-students were antecedently and subsequent to 1825, we know from the _Physiologie de l'Homme de Loi_; and it is not to be supposed that M. Ledru Rollin, with more ample pecuniary means at command, very much differed from his fellows. After undergoing a three years' course of study, M. Rollin obtained a diploma as a _licencié en droit_, and commenced his career as _stagiare_ somewhere about the end of 1826 or the beginning of 1827. Toward the close of 1829, or in the first months of 1830, he was, we believe, placed on the roll of advocates; so that he was called to the bar, or, as they say in France, received an advocate, in his twenty-second or twenty-third year. The first years of an advocate, even in France, are generally passed in as enforced an idleness as in England. Clients come not to consult the greenhorn of the last term; nor does any _avoué_ among our neighbors, any more than any attorney among ourselves, fancy that an old head is to be found on young shoulders. The years 1830 and 1831 were not marked by any oratorical effort of the author of the _Decline of England_; nor was it till 1832 that, being then one of the youngest of the bar of Paris, he prepared and signed an opinion against the placing of Paris in a state of siege consequent on the insurrections of June. Two years after he prepared a memoir; or _factum_, on the affair of the Rue Transonain, and defended Dupoty, accused of _complicité morale_, a monstrous doctrine invented by the Attorney-General Hebert. From 1834 to 1841 he appeared as counsel in nearly all the cases of _émeute_ or conspiracy where the individuals prosecuted were Republicans, or _quasi_-Republicans. Meanwhile, he had become the proprietor and _rédacteur en chef_ of the _Reforme_ newspaper, a political journal of an ultra-Liberal--indeed of a Republican--complexion, which was then called of extreme opinions, as he had previously been editor of a legal newspaper called _Journal du Palais_. _La Reforme_ had been originally conducted by Godefroy Cavaignac, the brother of the general, who continued editor till the period of the fatal illness which preceded his death. The defense of Dupoty, tried and sentenced under the ministry of Thiers to five years' imprisonment, as a regicide, because a letter was found open in the letter-box of the paper of which he was editor, addressed to him by a man said to be implicated in the conspiracy of Quenisset, naturally brought M. Rollin into contact with many of the writers in _La Reforme_; and these persons, among others Guinard Arago, Etienne