No! it is not to this sort of schoolboy mummery that Gallic fancies best love to return,--but to that portentous interval when the bright blaze of a magnificent meteor shone upon their iron chains, and made them look like gold. If this be true--if it cannot be denied that the affections of the French people cling with more gratitude to the splendid despotism of Napoleon than to any other period of their history, is it to be greatly feared that they should turn from the substantial power and fame that now "Flames in the forehead of the morning sky" before their eyes, accompanied as they are by the brightest promise of individual prosperity and well-being, in order to plunge themselves again into the mingled "blood and mire" with which their republic begrimed its altars? Were there even no other assurance against such a deplorable effort at national self-destruction than that which is furnished by the cutting ridicule so freely and so generally bestowed upon it, this alone, in a country where a laugh is so omnipotent, might suffice to reassure the spirits of the timid and the doubting. It has been said sturdily by a French interpreter of French feelings, that "si le diable sortait de l'enfer pour se battre, il se présenterait un Français pour accepter le défi." I dare say this may be very true, provided said diable does not come to the combat equipped from the armoury of Ridicule,--in which case the French champion would, I think, be as likely to run away as not: and for this reason, if for no other, I truly believe it to be impossible that any support should now be given in France to a party which has not only made itself supremely detestable by its atrocities, but supremely ridiculous by its absurdities. It is needless to recapitulate here observations already made. They have been recorded lightly, however, and their effect upon the reader may not be so serious as that produced upon my own mind by the circumstances which drew them forth; but it is certain that had not the terrible and most ferocious plot against the King's life given a character of horror to the acts of the republican party in France, I should be tempted to conclude my statement of all I have seen and heard of them by saying, that they had mixed too much of weakness and of folly in their literature, in their political acts, and in their general bearing and demeanour, to be ever again considered as a formidable enemy by the government. I was amused the other day by reading in an English newspaper, or rather in an extract from an Irish one, (The Dublin Journal,) a passage in a speech of Mr. Daniel O'Connell's to the "Dublin Trades' Union," the logic of which, allowing perhaps a little for the well-known peculiarities in the eloquence of the "Emerald Isle," reminded me strongly of some of the republican reasonings to which I have lately listened in Paris.