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POSTSCRIPT.

"Vous l'avez voulu, George Dandin, vous l'avez voulu."

Molière.

August 10, 1830.

THE foregoing work had been some time forwarded to the London publishers, and was rapidly printing for immediate publication, when the news of the revolution of France reached us, a short distance from Dublin. We returned to town in the certainty of receiving letters from Paris, which would throw a further light upon the details collected by the public press; and we were not disappointed.

In the work, however, which had gone to press, there was no time to change a line; no opportunity to interpolate a word. But unexpected as was the immediate advent of the

great explosion, it was gratifying to discover that no such change was necessary. Had time allowed, there was much indeed to add, but there was nothing to alter.

The revolution of 1830 is a justification of the opinions, and a corollary on the facts, disclosed in the preceding volumes; as it is an authority and a sanction for the spirit and the sentiments which my former work on "France" advanced in 1816. This is no place to enlarge upon the force and nature of private feelings, nor to indulge in the most pardonable species of egotism, an expression of individual sympathy with the triumph of the great cause of nations and of humanity. If the friends of freedom all over the world rejoice in the event, on the abstract principle of right, even when personally unacquainted with the great people who have effected it, well may they, who, almost naturalized in France by a community of feelings and opinions, are united in bonds of long intimacy and friendship with some of the brightest, and the greatest, of her children; and who have lived to behold in the

founder of the National Guard of 1789, the Général Commandant of that sublime army in 1830-for the word "sublime" is not here misplaced. Moral sublimity can go no further than in the combination of the highest reason with the most ardent passion.

In the interval, however, what struggles, what trials, what calumnies, what sufferings, what a triumph of folly and crime, what oppression of wisdom and of virtue! But the past is passed; or, if ever again to be quoted, it must be as a warning for the future, as a ground of happiness for the present, as an excuse for a revolution without vengeance, and a victory without a crime.

When I finished the last note for the foregoing work, in 1829, France was at rest, at peace with herself, and with the world; resigned to the obvious progress of events, bearing with the present, and full of hope for the future. The ministry was not popular, but it was not obnoxious. It was not level with the "hauteur des circonstances," but it was far above that of the Villèle administration,

whom it was a revolution to have displaced.* The Jesuit faction, abhorred as the agents of national retrogradation, had been suppressed by the force of public opinion. National prosperity was once more in progress; and the virtues of the splendid youth of France were the anchor of reliance for the future. The wisdom of experience watched over the sober interests of the nation, Liberty kept her vigils with an unwearied spirit, and Hope reposed in the inevitable nature of things, and the uncontrollable march of events.

Such was France in the summer of 1829, under the administration of Martignac and his colleagues; when, by an act of royal volition, (or rather of royal insanity,) the Prince Polignac was brought into power. As a man insignificant, he was hated as a sign: the very name was cabalistic. Loaded with associations the most abhorred in France, it recalled corruption in manners, despotism in politics, the favour

* This was the opinion expressed to us by General Lafayette, the day before we left Paris.

itism of the ail de bœuf, and the conspiracy of the infernal machine. It roused the prejudices connected with a long-continued emigration, and a foreign dependence, with all that was false, feeble, and anti-national in bye-gone generations.

The signal of counter-revolution thus given, the nation turned out to oppose it. The guard of resistance was simultaneously mounted; and the press, the free press, took the initiative, and formed the videttes of the great force of public opinion. The moral strength of France was under arms; and well and wisely was the nation on the alert to repel the threatened attack in its infancy, and to avert, if it was yet possible, the evils which impended. Coldblooded and malignant observers, both in France and in England, accused the French people of an "ignorant impatience," in opposing the royal pleasure respecting this nomination of a ministry, before an overt act of criminality had authorized their rejection of the men. But if the future conduct of Polignac and his colleagues was undeclared, their antecedents were notorious; the past was a clear