estation of the victorious
people, and his sacrifice did not save the dynasty. What was passing
among our neighbours for once created sympathy, and not repulsion,
on this side the Channel. One French Revolution had condemned English
Liberalism to forty years of subjection, and another was to be the
signal which launched it on as long a career of supremacy. Most men
said, and all felt, that Wellington must follow Polignac; and the public
temper was such as made it well for the stability of our throne that
it was filled by a monarch who had attracted to himself the hopes and
affection of the nation, and who shared its preferences and antipathies
with regard to the leading statesmen of the day.

One result of political disturbance in any quarter of the globe is to
fill the scene of action with young members of Parliament, who follow
Revolutions about Europe as assiduously as Jew brokers attend upon the
movements of an invading army. Macaulay, whose re-election for Calne
had been a thing of course, posted off to Paris at the end of August,
journeying by Dieppe and Rouen, and eagerly enjoying a first taste of
continental travel. His letters during the tour were such as, previously
to the age of railroads, brothers who had not been abroad before used to
write for the edification of sisters who expected never to go abroad at
all. He describes in minute detail manners and institutions that to us
are no longer novelties, and monuments which an educated Englishman of
our time knows as well as Westminster Abbey, and a great deal better
than the Tower. Everything that he saw, heard, ate, drank, paid, and
suffered, was noted down in his exuberant diction to be read aloud and
commented on over the breakfast table in Great Ormond Street.

"At Rouen," he says, "I was struck by the union of venerable antiquity
with extreme liveliness and gaiety. We have nothing of the sort in
England. Till the time of James the First, I imagine, our houses were
almost all of wood, and have in consequence disappeared. In York there
are some very old streets; but they are abandoned to the lowest people,
and the gay shops are in the newly-built quarter of the town. In London,
what with the fire of 1666, and what with the natural progress of
demolition and rebuilding, I doubt whether there are fifty houses that
date from the Reformation. But in Rouen you have street after street of
lofty stern-looking masses of stone, with Gothic carvings. The buildings
ar