been printed at "Sir's" press: and the
typography is, in the language of the curious,
exquisite. The lighter strokes of the letters are
fine as hairs, and the whole effect is clear, clean,
sharp, and brilliant. On both sides of the binding,
flames out the fleur-de-lis. On the title-page,
dated seventeen hundred and eighty eight,
we read M. Florian's military apotheosis,
"Captain of Dragoons in his Highness's, my Lord
the Duke of Penthièvre's Regiment, Gentleman
of his Highness, Fellow of the Academies of
Madrid, Lyons," &c. High by, on the same shelf,
lies a Royal Army List, which, though dated
'eighty-nine, must have been for the preceding
year; and here we cannot find M. Florian's name
among the lower grades of the Penthièvre
Dragoons. The conclusion is, that M. Florian must
been plunged abruptly into his rank of
captainship, without probation in the lower degrees:
a precious, because unconscious, bit of testimony
to the rotten organisation of all things in this
falal year of break up. It is hard not to
suspect our illustrious subject of playing a little
mild Egalité game, coquetting as he was with
the "strong spirits," and writing cold letters
of advice to the unlucky king. He was known
to have prophesied some sort of moral
earthquakes. There was that scene of his going
to register the edict, after what was
comically termed a Bed of Justice, and when his
coach got surrounded with an excited mob,
who were hampering the horses and blocking
up the street. My Lord "Sir" is presently
seen, thrusting itself well and conspicuously
out of the coach window to address the coachman.
All the mob round hear him say in a
loud ringing voice, " AKE CARE TO HURT
NO ONE!" Shout, as of course from mob, for
tender-hearted prince, who is escorted home
in tempest of vivas! This may be a hard
construing of a simple well-meant action; but yet
the exhibition of that prominent royal torso
at the window, suggests irresistibly a bit of the
old theatrical manner. The temptation of "striking
an attitude" before such an audience, even
on the disadvantageous boards of four wheels,
was not to be resisted.

"Never, never shall I desert the king!" did
he assure the great breechless, who were unquiet
and afraid he was about stealing off like the other
emigrants. Not a month after, when the
unwieldy berline was rumbling along the paved road
to Varennes, my Lord the "Sir" was skulking
along in disguise, presenting at the various
posts an old frayed well-worn English passport,
filled in with the name of "Michael Forster,"
which he had picked up somehow. It fared
better with the sham Michael Forster than with
the courier of the sham Baroness Korff. Who
was the real Michael Forster? The sham Forster
was certainly true to the letter of his promise to
the mob; he did not desert the king, for he fled
with him.

For a man with so dramatic a turn of mind,
the incidents of that splendid restoration to
Paris in eighteen hundred and fourteen, must
have been singularly gratifying. Never were
such gorgeous scenery appointments and
decorations. All the costumes, too, of the genuine
sort, and worn by real supernumeraries
belonging to the country they purposed to represent.
"The army" of William Tell was but a
poor thing to this exhibition. All eye-witnesses
who had rushed over in flocks, were dazzled and
bewildered. Emperors, kings, and princes, were
to be seen in thick groups. They were cheap in
those days. Everybody has read and heard of,
and perhaps seen too, that, gorgeous kaleidoscope,
which kept turning and turning for many days,
showing Russians, Poles, Cossacks of the Don,
Tartars, Germans, English, Belgians, all blended
in a dazzling mass of colour. What a theatre,
too, for such a spectacle—no other than that
gay city of Paris! The Russians picketed in
the Elysium fields—the Cossacks, with their long
spears, cantering through the Place Vendôme
—the rude Blucher, eager for general sack
and blowing up of bridges—these things are
all familiar to us. There are large coloured
prints to be seen, crowded with figures,
representing "The Entry of the Allied Sovereigns
into Paris!" when every Legitimist heart was
made glad. With all these accessories, we may
be sure the huge centre figure—now, alack, a
very obese Bourbon, and an abdominal personification
of Divine right—was not slack in availing
himself of the opportunity, and struck
"attitudes" for the "Allied Sovereigns" all day
long.

There is one thing we can never forgive that
bevy of sovereigns—that ruthless stripping of
the city of all those cosmopolitan treasures of
art which had been stripped from other cities.
What a Vatican had Paris the Beautiful been
now, with all that plunder! And yet had the
"Corsican upstart" but conducted himself
decently at Elba, it was signed, sealed, and agreed
that the French were to keep all these famous
spoils. We who go down to the sea in ships,
in the mail-boats of the South Eastern, need
have journeyed on no farther. Everything would
have been focused satisfactorily; and though
the arrangement was a little lawless in its origin,
we would all be spared much travelling. The
laquais de place of Home, and Venice, and
Florence, would be sadly out of work and would
retire from business. At book auctions is now and
then offered a superb work known as the Musée
Français: a series of costly plates, exhibiting as
French property the "Transfiguration" stolen
from the Vatican, and other matchless
treasures.

I think it is pardonable in Frenchmen never to
forget the bitter personal mortifications to which
that return of the Bourbons exposed them. It
almost amounts to an individual degradation.
Some one has described his walking abroad in the
morning across the gay Place du Carrousel, and
seeing men with windlasses and tackle busy
slinging the glorious Venetian horses, their
gilding resplendent in the sun, down upon
wagons, to be packed in great cases, and marked
we may suppose, "VENICE—Returned Goods."
What rage in the roused bystanders as they