to the newly-made king that he had best
withdraw. So splendid an opportunity was not to be
thrown away, and taking care that he had a clear
space round him, again he "struck" an attitude.

"I am r-r-ready to depart," he said to the
astonished officer; "but, before I go, e-rase from
the Gee-olden Book the six names of my family,
and give me back the see-word which my ancestor
Henry the Fourth gave the republic!" two
unmeaning and melodramatic requests which, it is
scarcely necessary to add, were not complied
with. It would be unreasonable and unjust to
the six ancestors to expunge them from that
distinguished volume; and to the sword of the great
Henry, which would no doubt fetch its price as a
valuable relic, he could have no shadow of a title.

No man ever had such opportunities for these
attitudes. There seemed to be a sort of
Providence in it, which furnished him with decent
opportunity. Even on crossing the St. Gothard
—when a bullet grazed him—he was not taken
by surprise; and in that lonely pass, and with
no greater audience than a simple guide, he
contrived to "strike" his attitude once more,
and delivered this sentiment: "If the ball had
passed a single hair's breadth lower, the present
Keying of France would be called Charles the
Tenth!" O note the atmosphere of foolery these
poor souls lived in!

We might call him the Elliston of the
Bourbons—Charles Lamb's Elliston. The marriage
of the Due d'Angoulême furnished a fine
opportunity for a neat tag. A dismal sort of solemnity
it must have been; but when the curtain was
about to come down, the "heavy father" was
observed to come forward to the foot-lights, and
made the newly-married pair this pathetic speech:
"If the kee-rown of France was all roses, I
would give it to ye cheerfully; but as it is all
thorns, I keep it for myself!" A richly comic
scene, which must have amused such English
spectators as were present, and suggests Mr.
Elliston in the mock procession and mock
coronation robes, lifting up his hands and giving the
pit his benediction: "Bless ye, my people!"

Everybody seemed bent on giving him an
opening for "a point." Even that far-seeing
"M. Bonaparte" forgot these dramatic propensities
of his, and was so injudicious as to convey to
him a proposal to dispose of his royal rights in
petto. There was an opportunity not likely to
recur again; so he gets out his old royal
furniture and decorations, fits on his gold paper
crown, and begins his stamping and striding:
not alone for M. Bonaparte, but for the
sovereigns generally, who will receive their letters
by the next post, and draw weary sighs over
the closely-written Bourbon writing. It was a
mistake, a sad blunder of M. Bonaparte's. He
should have been wiser; and, curious to say, the
acting on this occasion was decent and classical,
and not nearly so exaggerated as usual; for he
declined the offer with a certain dignity, and said
that he was conscious how much "M. Bonaparte"
had done for the good and glory of
France. But at the same time—here the minor
actor, too long restrained, broke out—he was
THE SON OF SAINT LOUIS! and he might
be allowed, with a certain appropriateness, to
give them the well-known sentiment, TOUT EST
PERDU FORS L'HONNEUR! It was considered
among the Bourbon followers, that this neat
"tag" utterly extinguished the "Corsican
upstart." No doubt, he never raised his head
afterwards, and the train of subsequent reverses
might reasonably be attributed to that fatal
thunderbolt.

On a later occasion he played with a suitable
dignity, but still when it was so easy to play with
dignity that he deserves no uncommon credit.
On the news of that wholesale freezing out
at Moscow being brought in, and every true
British heart being frantic with joy at "the
low Corsican upstart" being thus exterminated
wholesale by the mere force of the elements,
the lord mayor and corporation of the city of
London determined to celebrate the event with
more than usual festivity; and, with the
questionable taste which seasons the proceedings of
that body, sent an invitation to M. Louis Capet
at Hartwell, praying him to come and drink
pottle-deep to the confusion of those who had
been frozen, en masse, like frogs in a pond.
M. Louis Capet the Eighteenth sent back a firm
but respectful reply, declining such indecent
rioting over the confusion of his countrymen,
not his enemies. And yet, by-and-by, in
compensation as it were, must burst forth the old
element, spoiling all; for we find him with
that eternal pen of his in hand, writing to
the Emperor of all the Russias, and entreating,
with an infinite burlesque, grace, and consideration,
for the French prisoners "my children"
(mes enfans!). How the autocrat must have
smiled over the comic notion.

Though our popular idea of him is that fat,
rolling, good natured, mulish, dull, wrong-necked
order, which is the hereditary Bourbon type,
there were points of exception in him, not
quite so harmless. From being a looker-on all
his life, a lounger at the windows with his arms
on the balustrade of the balcony looking down
in security at what was going on below, he had
become a cautious knowing Bourbon, almost
crafty. We have our suspicions of him from the
very beginning, from those days when—having
a forecasting of the revolutionary business—he
kept himself in a sort of neutrality. We hear
of him shut up carefully in his little apartments
whence he scribbled his epigrams, or what he
called his epigrams, for they are mostly of a very
poor quality. He was lying in wait, as it were,
fearful of committing himself, and we may
suspect, was playing a little Egalité game of his
own. As he looked on, he had little quiet
pastimes of his own. He sent out satirical
pamphlets, which are not at all satirical. He wrote
an opera called the Caravan. There were
numerous institutions which bore his name,
"Monsieur." There was, "Sir's" theatre: "Sir's"
journal; and "Sir's " printing press, where no
doubt were printed his own lucubrations. On
this very desk lies a copy of Florian's Estelle,
that elegant screed of namby-pamby, which has