different from the sneer with which Encyclopaedists of Voltaire's time attacked Christianity and Deism. To prove, however, the magnificent many-sidedness of our noble times, it is we that have returned once more to pictures of the Virgin Mary with winking and with weeping eyes, or to her apparitions talking _patois_, as that of La Valette, and to a hundred things in the Church, cautiously passed over _sub silentio_ in the last century, but now joyously proclaimed and sustained with defiant erudition by English and German _doctores graces_, and by the Parisian "Univers," which, openly rejoicing in the English blood spilt by the Sepoys,--for it is but Protestant blood, and that of hateful freemen,--heralds the second or third advent of universal love and Papacy. It is in our age that representative, and indeed all institutional government, for the first time, is called effete parliamentarism, a theatrical delusion, for which, according to the requirements of advanced civilization, the beneficent, harmonious, and ever-glorious Caesarism, _pur et simple_, must be substituted, as it was once sublimely exhibited in the attractive Caesars of Rome, those favorites of History and very pets of Clio. In the time of Tiberius, as President Troplong beautifully and officially expressed it, "Democracy at last seated herself on the imperial throne, embodied in the Caesars,"--those worshipful incarnations of democracy, brought to our view in the _tableaux_ of Suetonius and by the accounts of Tacitus. We have at last returned to Caesarism, or Asiatic absolutism, improved by modern light, and making the emperor a Second Providence, opening and shutting the mouths of the universal-suffrage people, for words or bread, as imperial divinity finds best. This is the progress of our age in Europe, while we, in this hemisphere, have taken, for the first time in history, a rational view of party strife, and with unclouded intelligence maintain that judges and presidents are, and ought to be, party exponents, doing away with those once romantic, but certainly superannuated ideas of Country, Justice, Truth, and Patriotism. All real progress tends toward simplification; and how simple are the idea of party and the associations clustering around this sacred word, compared with the confusing and embarrassing unreality of those ideas and juvenile feelings we have mentioned last!