All the Liberals throughout the world held a jubilee as soon as they heard of the death of the old Pope, who had, no one could tell how, held them in check. The whole world seemed to have been suddenly relieved of an invisible burden, and bounded with a wild and frantic joy. The good time that had been a-coming, now could come. This joy grew wilder and more frantic still, when it was known that Cardinal Mastai was the new Pope. He was known to be gentle and humane, kind-hearted and pious, and suspected of leaning to liberal views, and of being a Giobertian; and nobody doubted that he would attempt a policy the reverse of Gregory’s. We, who were in the secret, knew that he was not the choice of Austria, and had no doubt that he would incline to France, and follow, to no inconsiderable extent, the advice of Count Rossi, the French Ambassador, and one of our friends. At that time Guizot was at the head of the government of France under Louis Philippe, a Protestant and a quasi-conservative statesman, but with many sympathies with the European Liberals. He believed, or professed to believe, that a change in the institutions of the monarchical states in Europe, giving the people a moderate share in the government, was demanded by the exigencies of European society, and if freely offered by authority, and not given as a concession to the people in arms to effect it, would be a wise and beneficial public measure, and in an eminent degree politic too, as it would tend to extract the point from the declamations of the radicals, and prevent, or at least indefinitely postpone, the revolution with which all Western and Central Europe was threatened. He had urged this policy upon Prussia, perhaps upon Austria, certainly upon the smaller German states which had not yet adopted the constitutional _régime_, and upon the Pope and the other Italian princes.