's squirt was hung up in peace, and M. Thiers's pigmy
figure and round spectacled face were no more to appear in print.*
Robert Macaire was driven out of the Chambers and the Palace--his
remarks were a great deal too appropriate and too severe for the ears of
the great men who congregated in those places.

* Almost all the principal public men had been most
ludicrously caricatured in the Charivari: those mentioned
above were usually depicted with the distinctive attributes
mentioned by us.

The Chambers and the Palace were shut to him; but the rogue, driven out
of his rogue's paradise, saw "that the world was all before him where
to choose," and found no lack of opportunities for exercising his wit.
There was the Bar, with its roguish practitioners, rascally attorneys,
stupid juries, and forsworn judges; there was the Bourse, with all its
gambling, swindling, and hoaxing, its cheats and its dupes; the Medical
Profession, and the quacks who ruled it, alternately; the Stage, and the
cant that was prevalent there; the Fashion, and its thousand follies
and extravagances. Robert Macaire had all these to exploiter. Of all
the empire, through all the ranks, professions, the lies, crimes,
and absurdities of men, he may make sport at will; of all except of
a certain class. Like Bluebeard's wife, he may see everything, but
is bidden TO BEWARE OF THE BLUE CHAMBER. Robert is more wise than
Bluebeard's wife, and knows that it would cost him his head to enter it.
Robert, therefore, keeps aloof for the moment. Would there be any use in
his martyrdom? Bluebeard cannot live for ever; perhaps, even now, those
are on their way (one sees a suspicious cloud of dust or two) that are
to destroy him.

In the meantime Robert and his friend have been furnishing the designs
that we have before us, and of which perhaps the reader will be edified
by a brief description. We are not, to be sure, to judge of the French
nation by M. Macaire, any more than we are to judge of our own national
morals in the last century by such a book as the "Beggars' Opera;" but
upon the morals and the national manners, works of satire afford a world
of light that one would in vain look for in regular books of history.
Doctor Smollett would have blushed to devote any considerable portion
of his pages to a discussion of the acts and character of Mr. Jonathan
Wild, such a figure being hardly admissible among the dignified
personages who usually push