rresponding difference does not make itself
manifest in the aspect of their respective countries.

It might have been readily anticipated that the maintenance of the popular
right as a constitutional principle, operating through a long course of
ages, would have produced not only a sturdy independence among the bulk of
the English nation, but to some extent also, a local independence of the
country as regards the capital and the court. It might have been foreseen,
that instead of concentrating every separate ray of genius and renown into
one grand _halo_ around the throne, this habitual effort of the popular
mind would have had a tendency to scatter those rays more equally over the
land, making the green valley and the sequestered hamlet rejoice, each in
the memory of its bard or hero. Such might have been our prognostic from
the political condition of England as compared with that of the continent,
and such will be found upon observation to have been the result. A French
poet aptly describes the centralizing influences of his own capital as
regards France, when he tells us that 'at Paris people _live_, elsewhere
they only _vegetate_.' One great holocaust of talents, reputations and
fortunes forever ascends there to the glory of the Grand Nation, absorbing
every thing, assimilating every thing to itself, and leaving the country
widowed of its interest and shorn of its appropriate graces. The poet,
whose footsteps on the sunny plains of Provence would have long brightened
in the traditions of its peasantry; the hero, whose name would have
sufficed to confer undying interest on some old _chateau_ of the Jura; the
orator, whose leisure hours might have made some French Tusculum on the
banks of the Loire forever fresh with the memory of associated honors; all
these have alike hastened to Paris, identified themselves once for all
with its crowds, and added whatever _prestige_ might attend their own
names through future ages to the already overshadowing _prestige_ of that
wonderful city. They point you there to the house where the great
Corneille breathed his last; it is hard by the metropolitan church of St.
Roche, and scarcely more than a bow-shot from the Tuilleries, as if the
poet of Cinna and Polyeucte could not render up his breath in peace except
in the neighborhood of those high dignitaries, into whose lips he had
breathed while living so much of his own grandeur and elevation; but who
reminds you of the hills of his na