tion, they had lately
maintained with reputation the principles of representative government,
they enjoyed the esteem and even the favour of the public; the more
violent party, through necessity, and the country, with some hesitation,
mingled with honest hope, followed in their rear. If at this critical
moment they could have succeeded with the King as with the Chambers and
the country,--if Charles X., after having by the dissolution pushed his
royal prerogative to the extreme verge, had listened to the strongly
manifested wishes of France, and selected his advisers from amongst
those of the constitutional Royalists who stood the highest in public
consideration, I say, with a feeling of conviction which may appear
foolhardy, but which I maintain to this hour, that there was every
reasonable hope of surmounting the last decisive trial; and that the
country taking confidence at once in the King and in the Charter, the
Restoration and constitutional government would have been established
together.

But the precise quality in which Charles X. was deficient, was that
expansive freedom of mind which conveys to a monarch a perfect
intelligence of the age in which he lives, and endows him with a sound
appreciation of its resources and necessities. "There are only M. de La
Fayette and I who have not changed since 1789," said he, one day; and he
spoke truly. Through all the vicissitudes of his life he ever remained
what his youthful training had made him at the Court of Versailles and
in the aristocratic society of the eighteenth century--sincere and
light, confident in himself and in his own immediate circle, unobservant
and irreflective, although of an active spirit, attached to his ideas
and his friends of the old system as to his faith and his standard.
Under the reign of his brother Louis XVIII., and during the scission of
the monarchical party, he became the patron and hope of that Royalist
opposition which boldly availed itself of constitutional liberties, and
presented in his own person a singular mixture of persevering intimacy
with his old companions, and of a taste for the new popularity of a
Liberal. When he found himself on the throne, he made more than one
coquettish advance to this popular disposition, and sincerely flattered
himself that he governed according to the Charter, with his old friends
and his ideas of earlier times. M. de Villele and M. de Martignac lent
themselves to his views in this difficult work; a