efore it met, the elections having pronounced
emphatically against his government.

At last the passions of the people became excited, and daily increased
in violence. Then came resistance to the officers of the law; then
riots, then barricades, then the occupation of the Tuileries, then
ineffectual attempts of the military to preserve order and restrain the
violence of the people. Marshal Marmont, with only twelve thousand
troops, was powerless against a great city in arms. The king thinking it
was only an _emeute,_ to be easily put down, withdrew to St. Cloud; and
there he spent his time in playing whist, as Nero fiddled over burning
Rome, until at last aroused by the vengeance of the whole nation, he
made his escape to England, to rust in the old palace of the kings of
Scotland, and to meditate over his kingly follies, as Napoleon meditated
over his mistakes in the island of St. Helena.

Thus closed the third act in the mighty drama which France played for
one hundred years: the first act revealing the passions of the
Revolution; the second, the abominations of military despotism; the
third, the reaction toward the absolutism of the old regime and its
final downfall. Two more acts are to be presented,--the perfidy and
selfishness of Louis Philippe, and the usurpation of Louis Napoleon; but
these must be deferred until in our course of lectures we have
considered the reaction of liberal sentiments in England during the
ministries of Castlereagh, Canning, and Lord Liverpool, when the Tories
resigned, as Metternich did in Vienna.

Yet the reign of the Bourbons, while undistinguished by great events,
was not fruitless in great men. On the fall of Napoleon, a crowd of
authors, editors, orators, and statesmen issued from their retreats, and
attracted notice by the brilliancy of their writings and speeches.
Crushed or banished by the iron despotism of Napoleon, who hated
literary genius, they now became a new power in France,--not to
propagate infidel sentiments and revolutionary theories, but to awaken
the nation to a sense of intellectual dignity and to maturer views of
government; to give a new impulse to literature, art, and science, and
to show how impossible it is to extinguish the fires of liberty when
once kindled in the breasts of patriots, or to put a stop to the
progress of the human mind among an excitable, intelligent, though
fickle people, craving with passionate earnestness both popular rights
and constitu