The tailor can certainly do much towards making the exterior of one individual look like the exterior of another; but he cannot do all that we see in the mien of a Polytechnic scholar that serves to recall the extraordinary man whose name, after years of exile and of death, is decidedly the most stirring that can be pronounced in France. Busy, important, and most full of human interest has been the period since his downfall; yet his memory is as fresh among them as if he had marched into the Tuileries triumphant from one of his hundred victories but yesterday. O, if the sovereign people could but understand as well as read!... And O that some Christian spirit could be found who would interpret to them, in such accents as they would listen to, the life and adventures of Napoleon the Great! What a deal of wisdom they might gain by it! Where could be found a lesson so striking as this to a people who are weary of being governed, and desire, one and all, to govern themselves? With precisely the same weariness, with precisely the same desire, did this active, intelligent, and powerful people throw off, some forty years ago, the yoke of their laws and the authority of their king. Then were they free as the sand of the desert--not one individual atom of the mighty mass but might have risen in the hurricane of that tempest as high as the unbridled wind of his ambition could carry him; and what followed? Why, they grew sick to death of the giddy whirl, where each man knocked aside his neighbour, and there was none to say "Forbear!" Then did they cling, like sinking souls in the act of drowning, to the first bold man who dared to replace the yoke upon their necks; they clung to him through years of war that mowed down their ranks as a scythe mows down the ripe corn, and yet they murmured not. For years they suffered their young sons to be torn from their sides while they still hung to them with all the first fondness of youth, and yet they murmured not;--for years they lived uncheered by the wealth that commerce brings, uncheered by any richer return of labour than the scanty morsel that sustained their life of toil, and yet they murmured not: for they had once more a prince upon the throne--they had once more laws, firmly administered, which kept them from the dreaded horrors of anarchy; and they clung to their tyrant prince, and his strict and stern enactments, with a devotion of gratitude and affection which speaks plainly enough their lasting thankfulness to the courage which was put forth in their hour of need to relieve them from the dreadful burden of self-government.