and diffusive politeness, but an ever-ready reflection and a constant reserve. His great qualities are rather peculiar. He is not, like his uncle, a creative genius, who will leave behind him social institutions such as those which nearly alone, in this changeful country, seem to be always exempt from every change; he will suggest little; he has hardly an organising mind; but he will coolly estimate his own position and that of France; he will observe all dangers and compute all chances. He can act—he can be idle: he may work what is; he may administer the country. Any how _il fera son possible_, and you know, in the nineteenth century, how much and how rare that is. I see many people are advancing beautiful but untrue ethics about his private character. Thus I may quote as follows from a very estimable writer:—‘On the 15th of October, he requested his passports and left Aremberg for London. In this capital he remained from the end of 1838 to the month of August 1840. In these twenty months, instead of learning to command armies and govern empires, his days and nights, when not given to frivolous pleasures, were passed on the turf, in the betting-room, or in clubs where high play and desperate stakes roused the jaded energy of the _blasé_ gambler.’—(A. V. Kirwan, Esq., Barrister-at-Law, in _Fraser’s Magazine_.) The notion of this gentleman clearly is, that a betting man can’t in nature be a good statesman; that horse-racing is providentially opposed to political excellence; that ‘by an interesting illustration of the argument from design, we notice an antithesis alike marvellous and inevitable,’ between turf and tariffs. But, setting Paley for a moment apart, how is a man, by circumstances excluded from military and political life, and by birth from commercial pursuits, really and effectually to learn administration? Mr. Kirwan imagines that he should read all through Burke, common-place Tacitus, collate Cicero, and annotate Montesquieu. Yet take an analogous case. Suppose a man, shut out from trading life, is to qualify himself for the practical management of a counting-house. Do you fancy he will do it ‘by a judicious study of the principles of political economy,’ and by elaborately re-reading Adam Smith and John Mill? He had better be at Newmarket, and devote his _heures perdues_ to the Oaks and the St. Leger. He may learn there what he will never acquire from literary study—the instinctive habit of applied calculation, which is essential to a merchant and extremely useful to a statesman. Where, too, did Sir Robert Walpole learn business, or Charles Fox, or anybody in the eighteenth century? And after all, M. Michel de Bourges gave the real solution of the matter. ‘Louis Napoleon,’ said the best orator of the Mountain, ‘may have had rather a stormy youth (laughter). But don’t suppose that any one in all France imagines you, you _Messieurs_, of the immaculate majority, to be the least better (sensation).