Much as I deplore some of the consequences of the Revolution in France, and the atrocities by which it was stained, it is impossible not to admit the great and salutary change effected in the habits and feelings of the people since that event. Who can live on terms of intimacy with the French, without being struck by the difference between those of our time, and those of whom we read previously to that epoch? The system of education is totally different. The habits of domestic life are wholly changed. The relations between husband and wife, and parents and children, have assumed another character, by which the bonds of affection and mutual dependances are drawn more closely together; and _home_, sweet _home_, the focus of domestic love, said to have been once an unknown blessing, at least among the _haute noblesse_, is now endeared by the discharge of reciprocal duties and warm sympathies. It is impossible to doubt but that the Revolution of 1789, and the terrible scenes in the reign of terror which followed it, operated in producing the change to which I have referred. It found the greater portion of the _noblesse_ luxuriating in pleasure, and thinking only of selfish, if not of criminal indulgence, in pursuits equally marked by puerility and vice. The corruption of the regency planted the seeds of vice in French morals, and they yielded a plentiful harvest. How well has St.-Évremond described that epoch in his playful, but sarcastic verses!-- "Une politique indulgente, De notre nature innocente, Favorisait tous les désirs; Tout goût paraissait légitime, La douce erreur ne s'appelait point crime, Les vices délicats se nommalent des plaisirs." But it was reserved for the reign of Louis the Fifteenth to develope still more extensively the corruption planted by his predecessor. The influence exercised on society by the baleful example of his court had not yet ceased, and time had not been allowed for the reign of the mild monarch who succeeded that gross voluptuary to work the reform in manners, if not in morals, which his own personal habits were so well calculated to produce. It required the terrible lesson given by the Revolution to awaken the natural feelings of affection that had so long slumbered supinely in the enervated hearts of the higher classes in France, corrupted by long habits of indulgence in selfish gratifications. The lesson at once awoke even the most callous; while those, and there were many such, who required it not, furnished the noblest examples of high courage and self-devotion to the objects dear to them. In exile and in poverty, when all extraneous sources of consolation were denied them, those who if still plunged in pleasure and splendour might have remained insensible to the blessings of family ties, now turned to them with the yearning fondness with which a last comfort is clasped, and became sensible how little they had hitherto estimated them.