‘There is no other mode by which the Parisians can disarm the vengeance which now so closely impends over them, than by disclaiming for ever him whose crimes have been the just cause of that vengeance. Paris under the white standard, returning to loyalty and virtue, may be spared by a generous conqueror;—but Paris, identified with Bonaparte, must partake all the vindictive sentiments which are attached to that hateful name. [Yet some time ago this writer assured us that if the French people identified themselves with Bonaparte, they ought not to be separated from him.] ‘In what momentous times do we live! Perhaps, the famous city of which we speak may even now be laid in ashes! Perhaps and more welcome be the omen, it may have returned to its allegiance, and proclaimed its native Sovereign, and set a price on the head of that wicked rebel who still dares to call himself the Emperor of France.’—_Times_, March 17. ‘Nay, if you mouth, I’ll rant as well as you!’ It is a pity to spoil this morsel of Asiatic eloquence, so worthy of the subject and the sentiments; but the evident meaning of it is, that the French must expect to do penance in sack-cloth and ashes, or consent to put on the old livery jackets, made up for them by our army-agents long ago, and which have unfortunately lain on hand ever since. If so, they must needs be ‘pigeon-liver’d, and lack gall.’ Yet we hardly know what to say to the chivalrous and classical politicians of the Stock Exchange. They are not driven to the extremity of Gothic rage by the ranking inveteracy, and old unsatisfied grudge of the Pitt-school. Yet surely no pitiable enthusiast that ‘Scrawls With desperate charcoal on his darken’d walls,’ can be more incorrigible to reason. They are always setting out on their way to Paris from Moscow, while the Pitt-school studiously return to join Lord Hawkesbury in the year 1793, or they think the whole ceremony incomplete! The treaty of Pilnitz does not stand between our modern popular incendiaries and their just revenge! They live only in ‘this present ignorant time!’ They see the white standard of the Bourbons waving over the walls of Paris, unspotted with the blood of millions of Frenchmen! They do not seem ever to have known, or (with our poet-laureat) they forget, that the same standard to which our milky politicians advise the French people, sick of destruction, and panting for freedom, to fly for deliverance and repose, is that very standard, which, for twenty years, hovering round them, now seen like a cloudy speck in the distance—now spreading out its drooping lilies wide, has been the cause of that destruction—has robbed them at once of liberty and of repose!