you the whole tale of horror. It is told! The monarch in whose
hands are the lives of fifty millions of subjects, lies himself, to all
appearance, deprived of existence. But see! he revives--his lips
move--what are the words which fall faintly upon the ears of the
bewildered attendants who have been called into the apartment by the
cries of the prime minister? They are words of malediction, of the same
purport as those which Henry II. of England uttered against his
servants, for their want of zeal in allowing him to be so long tormented
by Thomas a Becket, and which caused that prelate's death. But alas! for
your repose, Imperial Caesar, it is not so easy at the present day, as in
former times, for de Luces and de Morevilles to gratify the vengeful
wishes of their masters, and Lady Morgan yet breathes the breath of life
(although it is true she did not do it "freely," according to her own
account, while in the vicinity of your ambassador in Paris,) to keep
your nervous system in disorder, and for the continued vexation of the
rational part of the reading world.

Multifarious are the other instances we might cite of the manner in
which her simple Ladyship was _mystified_ by the ironical propensities
of some, and the malicious ultraism of others, during her visit to Paris
in 1829-30. "There are certain characters," observes M. Jouy, "who may
be considered as the scourges of whatever is ridiculous (_les fleaux du
ridicule_;) they discover it under whatever form it may be hid, and
pitilessly immolate it with the weapon of irony," and into the hands of
persons of this merciless tribe she seems to have been perpetually
falling. We must content ourselves, however, with referring to but one
example more; a conversation between herself and a young Frenchman,
about Romanticism and Classicism, which she has detailed in her first
volume. This is a subject, which, as every one must know, has set all
Paris by the ears, and attracts almost as much attention there as the
overthrow of one dynasty and the creation of another. Lady Morgan, of
course, is a thorough-going _romantique_, and demonstrates the greater
excellence of the school of which she deems herself the chief support
and brightest ornament, in pretty much the same way as the superiority
of modern writers over the ancients used to be proved by the advocates
of the former, viz. by two methods, reason and example, the first of
which they derived from their own taste, and the se