which she was the centre for nearly one hundred and fifty years--say from the middle of the reign of Henry IV. to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, (1599-1748)--has passed entirely away from the world, and never can be restored. France has seldom seriously thought of attempting its restoration, though some of her statesmen, and probably a large majority of the more intelligent of her people, have from time to time warmly favored the idea of the reconstruction of Poland; and of all the errors of Napoleon I., his failure to realize that idea was unquestionably the greatest. The turn that things took in the French Revolution enabled France to establish an hegemony in Europe, which might have been long preserved but for the disasters of 1812; but the empire of Napoleon I. was never a political empire, being only of a military character. France then led Europe, but she lost her ascendency on the first reverse, like Sparta after Leuctra. History has no parallel to the change that the France of 1814 presented to the France of 1812. On the 1st of October, 1812, the French were at Moscow; on the 1st of April, 1814, the allies were in Paris. Eighteen months had done work that no man living at the first date had expected to see accomplished. What happened in 1815 was but the complement of 1814. Then France was struck down, trampled upon, spoiled, insulted, and mulcted in immense sums of money; and finally forced to pay the cost of an armed police, headed by Wellington himself, which held her chief fortresses for three years, and saw that her chains were kept bright and strong. Never, since Lysander demolished the Long Walls of Athens to the music of the Spartan flute, had the world seen so bitter a spectacle of national humiliation, so absolute a reversal of fortune,--the long-conquering legions perishing by the sword, and him who had headed so many triumphal processions perishing as it were in the Mamertine dungeon.