ete mystification in which he has succeeded in enveloping his real
character, mingling up together elements so strange, so incongruous,
and seemingly inconsistent, that the actual direction or object of any
political move he has ever made, will always bear a double appreciation.
The haughty monarch is the citizen king; the wily and secret politician,
the most free-spoken and candid of men: the most cautious in an
intrigue, the very rashest in action. How is it possible to divine the
meaning, or guess the wishes, of one whose nature seems so Protean?

His foreign policy is, however, the master-stroke of his genius,--the
cunning game by which he has conciliated the party of popular
institutions and beguiled the friends of absolutism, delighting Tom
Buncombe and winning praise from Nicholas. Like all clever men who are
vain of their cleverness, he has always been fond of employing agents of
inferior capacity, but of unquestionable devotion to his interests. What
small intelligences--to use a phrase more French than English--were
the greater number of the French ministers and secretaries I have met
accredited to foreign courts! I remember Talleyrand's observation, on
the remark being made, was, "His Majesty always keeps the trumps in
his own hand." Though, to be sure, he himself was an evidence to the
contrary--a "trump" led boldly out, the first card played!

So well did that subtle politician comprehend the future turn events
must take, that on hearing, at two o'clock in the morning, that his
Royal Highness the Duc d'Orleans had consented to assume the crown, he
exclaimed, "And I am now ambassador at St. James's!" It must have been
what the Londoners call "good fun" to have lived in the days of the
Empire, when all manner of rapid elevations occurred on every hand. The
_commis_ of yesterday, the special envoy to-day; a week ago a corporal,
and now gazetted an officer, with the cross of the Legion--on the
_grande route_, to become a general. A General, why not a Marshal of
France--ay, or a King?

We have seen something of this kind in Belgium within a few years
back--on a small scale, it is true. What strange ingredients did the
Revolution throw up to the surface! what a mass of noisy, turbulent,
self-opinionated incapables, who, because they had led a rabble at the
Porte de Flandre, thought they could conduct the march of an army!
And the statesmen!--good lack! the miserable penny-a-liners of the
"Independant" and the "