“The political career of Prince Talleyrand may be said to have begun at his very entrance into life. I have given you a sketch of his childhood—to detail the events of his youth would be to give the history of the close of the eighteenth century. I have heard him say often that few men could boast of having passed through life as he had done—always in a crowd, having to elbow his way through the thickest ranks. During those early years he cannot remember to have enjoyed or experienced a single week’s solitude. Always in a crowd, and that crowd composed of all that was celebrated at the time, for wit, fashion, and beauty, by his own merit he was continually in advance, and, long before the age when other men enter the lists, he had already travelled far on the road to fame and fortune. It is this circumstance which makes his age for ever a subject of dispute. His name has been so long before the public eye, in connexion with those of individuals who had begun their career so many years before him, that it seems as if he himself belonged to another epoch than our own. At the age of twenty-six, when he was named _agent-général_ of the clergy, he had already acquired the conviction that the society amid which he was born was tottering to its basis, and, moreover, that it was unworthy of an effort to save it from destruction. I remember being much amused by his description of the very first visit he paid after being invested by his uncle with the title and power of his new office, which, at the time, was one of great trust and influence, and one which demanded great industry and talent.