bers, sided from day to day with the constitutional
system,--the officers as intelligent and reflecting men, the soldiers as
staunch and contented royalists; but neither, in these recognized
capacities, inspired confidence in the country, which looked upon their
adhesion to the Charter as constrained or conditional, always insincere
and covering other views. The right, even while honestly accepting the
Charter, had also party interests to satisfy; when it aspired to power,
it was not solely to govern according to its principles, and to place
the restored monarchy on a solid basis: it had private misfortunes to
repair and positions to re-assume. It was not a pure and regular party
of Tory royalists. The emigrants, the remains of the old court and
clergy, were still influential amongst them, and eagerly bent on
carrying out their personal expectations. By its composition and
reminiscences, the party was condemned to much reserve and imprudence,
to secret aspirations and indiscreet ebullitions, which, even while it
professed to walk in constitutional paths, embarrassed and weakened its
action at every step.

The situation of the left was no less confused. It represented, at that
exact epoch, not the interests and sentiments of France in general, but
the interests and sentiments of that portion of France which had
ardently, indistinctly, and obstinately promoted and sustained the
Revolution, under its republican or imperial form. It cherished against
the House of Bourbon and the Restoration an old habit of hostility,
which the Hundred Days had revived, which the most rational of the party
could scarcely throw off, the most skilful with difficulty concealed,
and the gravest considered it a point of honour to display as a protest
and corner-stone. In November 1816, a man of probity, as sincere in the
renunciation of his opinions of 1789 as he had formerly been in their
profession, the Viscount Matthieu de Montmorency, complained, in a
drawing-room of the party, that the Liberals had no love for legitimacy.
A person present defended himself from this reproach. "Yes," said
M. de Montmorency, with thoughtless candour, "you love legitimacy as we
do the Charter." A keen satire on the false position of both parties
under the government of the Charter and of legitimacy!

But if the right-hand party or the left, if the members of either in the
Chambers, had followed only their sincere convictions and desires, the
greater portion, I