le to employment, and favour again. An inextricable cabal was
formed, some of persons of rank, others of subordinates. But by this
means the corps of politicians was augmented in number, and the whole
formed a body of active, adventuring, ambitious, discontented people,
despising the regular ministry, despising the courts at which they
were employed, despising the court which employed them.

The unfortunate Louis the Sixteenth was not the first cause of the
evil by which he suffered. He came to it, as to a sort of inheritance,
by the false politics of his immediate predecessor. This system of
dark and perplexed intrigue had come to its perfection before he came
to the throne: and even then the Revolution strongly operated in all
its causes.

There was no point on which the discontented diplomatic politicians so
bitterly arraigned their cabinet, as for the decay of French influence
in all others. From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain
of monarchy itself, as a system of government too variable for any
regular plan of national aggrandisement. They observed, that in that
sort of regimen too much depended on the personal character of the
prince; that the vicissitudes produced by the succession of princes of
a different character, and even the vicissitudes produced in the same
man, by the different views and inclinations belonging to youth,
manhood, and age, disturbed and distracted the policy of a country
made by nature for extensive empire, or, what was still more to their
taste, for that sort of general over-ruling influence which prepared
empire or supplied the place of it. They had continually in their
hands the observations of _Machiavel_ on _Livy_. They had
_Montesquieu's Grandeur et Decadence des Romains_ as a manual; and
they compared, with mortification, the systematic proceedings of a
Roman senate with the fluctuations of a monarchy. They observed the
very small additions of territory which all the power of France,
actuated by all the ambition of France, had acquired in two centuries.
The Romans had frequently acquired more in a single year. They
severely and in every part of it criticised the reign of Louis XIV.,
whose irregular and desultory ambition had more provoked than
endangered Europe. Indeed, they who will be at the pains of seriously
considering the history of that period will see that those French
politicians had some reason. They who will not take the trouble of
reviewing it through a