The family of the Pasquiers were descended from Etienne Pasquier, a man of great talent and erudition, author of a celebrated work entitled "_Recherches sur la France_." His character was very remarkable from the versatility of his talents and occupations; he wrote clever verses, and displayed the greatest ability in the important correspondence in which he was engaged, and during the troubles of the League, he strove to find a middle course from whence he might offer himself as a timid mediator among the opposing parties. In my writings upon the events of the sixteenth century, I have often spoken of that good Etienne Pasquier, with his ingenious talents and the exquisite tact he displayed in the evil times of civil war. The direct progenitors of the subject of this memoir held an appointment in the parliament, and his father, Etienne Pasquier, councillor in the parliament of Paris, was denounced at the revolutionary tribunal and condemned to death on the 21st of April, 1794. His son was brought up at the College of Juilly, a fine institution, which has produced many distinguished characters. I have always admired the mild and careful system pursued by religious bodies, where the education of the heart and mind is as carefully attended to as that of the head, and which invested each professor with so paternal a character, that even the most ungrateful of his pupils could never entirely shake off the recollection; witness Voltaire and Diderot. M. Pasquier had scarcely left college before he was appointed to a situation in the Parisian parliament, according to the custom observed in families of the legal profession, where the office of the father was inherited by the son. He did not long continue to wear the parliamentary habit; he was, however, enabled to be present at the solemn debates which took place in that assembly, and were terminated by the convocation of the States-general, and he there received his first lesson in political life. The magistracy were carried away in the general tempest, and the parliaments were destroyed by the revolution; the resistance to the royal prerogative had originated with them, and both were abolished at the same time. Popular excitement is always ungrateful, and deals its first blow upon those by whom it has been assisted or fostered, thus affording an important lesson to demagogues or flatterers of the populace.