unreserved, without being
exceptious as to those with whom he might be conversing. He could render
himself acceptable to the middle classes, although indications of pride
and aristocratic haughtiness might be occasionally detected in his words
and manner. These symptoms were only perceptible to delicate
investigators; by the great majority he was considered affable and
unassuming. In the Chambers he spoke with ease and animation, if not
with eloquence, and often indulged in an attractive play of fancy. He
could have rendered good service to the constitutional government, had
he either loved or trusted it; but he joined it without faith or
preference, as a measure of necessity, to be evaded or restrained even
during the term of endurance. Through habit, and deference for his
party, or rather for his immediate coterie, he was perpetually recurring
to the traditions and tendencies of the old system, and endeavouring to
carry his listeners with him by shallow subtleties and weak arguments,
which were sometimes retorted upon himself. One day, partly in jest, and
partly in earnest, he proposed to M. Royer-Collard to obtain for him
from the King the title of Count. "Count?" replied M. Royer-Collard, in
the same tone, "make yourself a Count?" The Abbe de Montesquieu smiled,
with a slight expression of disappointment, at this freak of citizen
pride. He believed the old aristocracy to be beaten down, but he wished
to revive and strengthen it by an infusion with the new orders. He
miscalculated in supposing that none amongst the latter class would,
from certain instinctive tendencies, think lightly of a title which
flattered their interests, or that they could be won over by
conciliation without sympathy. He was a thoroughly honourable man, with
a heart more liberal than his ideas, of an enlightened and accomplished
mind, naturally elegant, but volatile, inconsiderate, and absent; little
suited for long and bitter contentions, formed to please rather than to
control, and incapable of leading his party or himself in the course in
which reason suggested that they should follow.

In the character of M. de Blacas there were no such apparent
inconsistencies. Not that he was either an ardent, or a decided and
stirring partisan of the contra-revolutionary reaction; he was moderate
through coldness of temperament, and a fear of compromising the King, to
whom he was sincerely devoted, rather than from clear penetration. But
neither his mo