day increased the bitterness of those who had
never been sincerely his friends, it tended to chill the affections of
the royalists who had partaken his exile, or laboured, ere success was
probable, for his return.

Louis had been called to the throne by the French senate, in a decree
which at the same time declared the legislative constitution, as
composed of a hereditary sovereign and two houses of assembly, to be
fixed and unchangeable; which confirmed the rights of all who had
obtained property in consequence of the events of the Revolution, and
the titles and orders conferred by Buonaparte: in a word, which summoned
the Bourbon to ascend the throne of Napoleon--on condition that he
should preserve that political system which Napoleon had violated.
Louis, however, though he proceeded to France on this invitation, did
not hesitate to date his first act in the twentieth year of his reign;
and though he issued a charter, conferring, as from his own free will,
every privilege which the senate claimed for themselves and the nation,
this mode of commencement could not fail to give deep offence to those,
not originally of his party, who had consented to his recall. These men
saw, in such assumptions, the traces of those old doctrines of _divine
right_, which they had through life abhorred and combated; and asked
why, if all their privileges were but the gifts of the King, they might
not, on any tempting opportunity, be withdrawn by the same authority?
They, whose possessions and titles had all been won since the death of
Louis XVI., were startled when they found, that, according to the royal
doctrine, there had been no legitimate government all that time in
France. The exiled nobles, meanwhile, were naturally the personal
friends and companions of the restored princes: their illustrious names,
and, we must add, their superior manners, could not fail to excite
unpleasant feelings among the new-made dukes and counts of Buonaparte.
Among themselves it was no wonder that expectations were cherished, and
even avowed, of recovering gradually, if not rapidly, the estates of
which the Revolution had deprived them. The churchmen, who had never
gone heartily into Napoleon's ecclesiastical arrangements, sided of
course with these impoverished and haughty lords; and, in a word, the
first tumult of the restoration being over, the troops of the Allies
withdrawn, and the memory of recent sufferings and disasters beginning
to wax dim amids