is not born for himself alone. He owes himself
to his subjects. The people, in elevating him, have entrusted him with
power and authority, and have reserved to themselves, in exchange, his
care, his time, his vigilance. He is a superintendant whom they have
placed at their head to protect and defend them. It is the people who,
by the order of God, have made them what they are.--Yes, Sire! _It is
the choice of the nation which has put the sceptre in the hand of your
ancestors._ It is it which proclaimed them sovereigns. The kingdom came
in time to be considered as the inheritance of their successors; but
they owed it at first to the free consent of their subjects, and it was
the public suffrages which, in the beginning, attached that right and
that prerogative to their birth. In a word, as their prerogative first
flowed from ourselves, so kings should make no use of their power but
for us.'"--(Vol. i. p. 67.)

Such was the eloquent and intrepid language in which Massillon addressed
the Regent Orleans and Louis XV., in the plenitude of their power, in
the chapel-royal at Versailles. It was a minister of the _established_
church, be it recollected, who thundered in those unmeasured terms to
the prince who held in his hands the whole patronage of the church of
France. We should like to see a preacher of the Free and popular
dissenting establishments of Great Britain or America, thunder in
equally intrepid strains on the sins which most easily beset the
democratic congregations upon whom their elevation and fortune depend.

"There is nothing new," says the Wise Man, "under the sun." We have seen
enough, of late years, of railway manias, and the almost incredible
anxiety of all classes to realise something in the numerous El Dorados
which infatuation or cupidity set afloat in periods of excitement. But,
from the following account of De Tocqueville, it appears that a hundred
and thirty years ago the same passions were developed on a still greater
scale in France; and even our ladies of rank and fashion may take a
lesson in these particulars from the marchionesses and countesses of the
court of the Regent Orleans.

"In the month of August 1719, the anxiety to procure shares (in the
Mississippi scheme) began to assemble an immense crowd in the street
Quincampoix, where, for many years, the public funds had been bought and
sold. From six in the morning, crowds of people, men and women, rich and
poor, gentlemen and burghers, fil