an goodness, will remain, to use the antique language of ancient
history, one of the best princes who ever sat on a throne.

What is there against him? That throne. Take away Louis Philippe the
king, there remains the man. And the man is good. He is good at times
even to the point of being admirable. Often, in the midst of his gravest
souvenirs, after a day of conflict with the whole diplomacy of the
continent, he returned at night to his apartments, and there, exhausted
with fatigue, overwhelmed with sleep, what did he do? He took a death
sentence and passed the night in revising a criminal suit, considering
it something to hold his own against Europe, but that it was a still
greater matter to rescue a man from the executioner. He obstinately
maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the
ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys,
those chatterers of the law, as he called them. Sometimes the pile of
sentences covered his table; he examined them all; it was anguish to
him to abandon these miserable, condemned heads. One day, he said to
the same witness to whom we have recently referred: "I won seven last
night." During the early years of his reign, the death penalty was
as good as abolished, and the erection of a scaffold was a violence
committed against the King. The Greve having disappeared with the elder
branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the name
of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity of
a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories of
Casimir Perier, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie,
over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides. Louis Philippe
annotated Beccaria with his own hand. After the Fieschi machine, he
exclaimed: "What a pity that I was not wounded! Then I might have
pardoned!" On another occasion, alluding to the resistance offered by
his ministry, he wrote in connection with a political criminal, who is
one of the most generous figures of our day: "His pardon is granted; it
only remains for me to obtain it." Louis Philippe was as gentle as Louis
IX. and as kindly as Henri IV.

Now, to our mind, in history, where kindness is the rarest of pearls,
the man who is kindly almost takes precedence of the man who is great.

Louis Philippe having been severely judged by some, harshly, perhaps, by
others, it is quite natural that a man, himself a phantom at the pres