It is not our intention to enter on the subject of reforms in the regular army which ensued, nor is there any necessity to detail all the circumstances which led England to turn her attention to her own safety, and in the interests of this to set her house in order. The causes for apprehension may have been exaggerated, but that they were altogether without foundation is incredible. It is indisputable that after the cession of Nice and Savoy to the Emperor of the French, disquieting rumours as to his further intentions were afloat. His next project, it was said, was the annexation of Geneva, and among other means of aggrandisement which he contemplated, one was an advance of the French frontier to the Ebro, in exchange for which Spain was to receive aid and support in the subjugation of Portugal. These designs of the Emperor were not only freely discussed in society, but set forth in pamphlets apparently stamped with Imperial authority. Lord Palmerston watched with much misgiving the great additional military and naval preparations on the part of France, and to him they were a source of grave anxiety; nor must these rumours, magnified and distorted as they may have been, be regarded by us with contempt, when it is known that such keen observers, and acute politicians, as the Prime Minister, Mr. Gladstone, and Panizzi himself, viewed them with perturbed reflections. In this year (1860), Panizzi, for the first time, had been invited by His Majesty Napoleon III. to spend his holidays at Biarritz, in company with his old friend Prosper Mérimée. Correspondence of much importance is here adduced, and is given in full, as bearing upon the suspicions and presages of evil already referred to. The first letter in order is from the pen of Panizzi to Mérimée, and from it may be gathered all that is needful of the dreaded omens which threatened to disturb the peaceful relations existing between England and France, whose alliance involved the peace of the whole civilized world, whilst its rupture would throw broadcast the seeds of dissension and of war. The letters themselves indicate the close relations between the two correspondents, and their intimacy, will be reverted to hereafter:— “British Museum, Sept. 30 (Sunday), 1860. “My dear Mérimée,