at it was during them alone that the causes which produced the
terrible convulsion began to operate. They were only brought to
maturity--but the catastrophe undoubtedly was accelerated by the vices
that succeeded the reign of Louis XIV., not so much by the evils they
inflicted on the people, as by the corruption which they spread among
the defenders of the throne. They paralysed the nobility by the fatal
gangrene of individual selfishness; they prostrated thought by diverting
it almost entirely to wicked and licentious purposes. Intellect, instead
of being the guardian of order, the protector of religion, the supporter
of morality, became their most fatal enemy; for its powers--and they
were gigantic in that age--were all devoted to the spread of infidelity,
the ridicule of virtue, the fomenting of passion. It is in this
_debauchery of the public mind_ by the example of royal and noble
profligacy, and the power of vigorous and perverted talent, that the
real causes of the Revolution are to be found. The working classes of
themselves can never overturn a state--if they could, England would have
been revolutionised in 1832. They may make a _Jacquerie_, but they
cannot make a revolution. They may rear up a Jack Cade, a Wat Tyler, or
a Jacques Bonhomme, but they will never produce a Robespierre or a
Cromwell. It is the _coincidence_ of general evils that make all the
people feel sore, with corrupted manners, and licentious or selfish
writers who make their leaders _think wrong_, which can alone overturn
society. The first furnishes the private soldier, the last the officers
to the army of revolution; or, what is the same thing, they withdraw
them from that of religion and order.

The latter years of Louis XV. were so completely sunk in shameless
debaucheries, the glory of France had been so long tarnished by the
wretched choice which his mistresses had made of ministers to rule the
state and generals to lead the armies, that the world has not
unnaturally come to entertain an opinion in many respects exaggerated or
erroneous, of his character. He had many good points; at first he was an
unexceptionable sovereign. Though bred up in the licentious school of
the Regent Orleans, he led in the outset a comparatively blameless life.
The universal grief which seized the nation when he lay at the point of
death at Metz, in 1744, proves to what extent he had then won the hearts
of his subjects. His person was fine and well-proportione