witnessed this direct affront! Of another morning,
an English lady—so she has told the writer
of these short notes—enters the grand galleries
of the Louvre, full of the gaiety of those gay
times, to see the wonderful treasures; by-and-by,
as she is sitting, resting after her fatigues
of peripatetic picture-gazing, she hears a heavy
tramp afar off, and gradually drawing nearer.
Then, enters a dark mass of soldiery, marching
four deep, which spreads itself out in a
long line, long as the gallery itself—the English
Rifle Brigade, with the familiar bugle-horn on
their caps. "Halt!" (in the English tongue),
and the muskets presently fall on the smooth
oaken parquet. Enter then, men with ladders
and hammers; and the business of taking
down the "Transfiguration" and the other noble
pictures sets in. Not without silent protest
in the shape of most mournful scowls and
clenching of teeth, floods of hatred and
disgust, at the stolid Saxon invaders.

In the life of that "Corsican upstart," as it
was part of the true British political religion to
call him, were many dazzling days and nights,
which, in his last dismal prison, it must have
been some consolation for him to dwell on. But
there was none coloured with a more delicious
fascination than that night of his restoration,
when, very late, he stood at the foot of the
Tuileries staircase, and, in a blaze of light, old
familiar faces poured down to meet him; and
there were tears and smiles, and intoxicating joy.
No wonder that he held that, to be the happiest
day of his life. In the midst of the scene,
some bright lady found her foot strike against
something rough upon the carpet, and looking
curiously, discovered it to be a yellow fleur-de-lis
sewn on over the golden Napoleonic bee.
A true sham, fatally typical of the Bourbon
hold on the sympathies of the country; and the
noble ladies present, with much mirth and
laughter, fetch scissors and rip out every one of
those flimsy ornaments.

The turbulent spirit of Haydon, weary of
bearding Academicians, found its way across to
this strange scene. No one has given so vigorous
a picture. He went up, and saw Divine
Right going by to chapel, with the newly-converted
Marshals Augereau and Marmont holding
up his coat-tails. "As they lifted up his
coat," says this fine noble nature—always in
protest against baseness of any sort—"I felt scorn
to see human being so degraded." He went to
the theatre where they were giving Hamlet,
and at particular passages saw the whole pit
start to their feet, and shriek furiously, "Bravo!
bravo! Down with the English! Down with
the English!" Mr. Raikes, the well-known
man about town, was there at about the same
time, and at the theatre at Compiègne, where
they were playing Vive Henri Quatre, and other
popular tunes.

The world is very familiar with the heavy
vengeance taken by the followers of this most
Christian king on their enemies, the legalised
shooting down of brave soldiers, and the
organised destruction of hunted outcasts by
Royalists. We walk down the Luxembourg
gardens among the nurserymaids, and are
shown where the bravest of the brave was
"fusillé." There are ugly associations with
restored Bourbons. O blind, infatuated race!

There is nothing in the world so dreary as
the fasti of this reign. It may all be read in
M. Guizot's stony and coldly classical memoirs.
Who cares for that aping of the English government
—that sham ministry and sham opposition,
with the doctrinaires and the rest of the
jargon? In the midst of all we still have the fat
figure, with the coat-tails held up, gorging itself
on rich dishes, and staying its stomach between
the courses with "picking little pork chops,"
dressed in a peculiar way! Truly said the rather
gay lady to whom he wrote, chiding her for being
more gay than she should be, to this effect, that
the wife of Cæsar should be above suspicion:
"I am not your wife; neither have you the
slightest resemblance to Cæsar." Very false
was the Talleyrand bon mot, coined to order for
the Count of Artois: "There is nothing changed
in France; there is only one Frenchman more"
—paraphrased bitterly by the wags of the
day, when all the world was going to see
that distinguished stranger the giraffe, newly
arrived at his lodgings in the Zoological
Gardens: "There is nothing changed in France;
there is only one beast more." So he goes on
to the end, picking his pork chops daintily in
his fingers between the courses, and with the
renegades holding up his coat-tails. From the
fat mouth proceed at times feeble puns, and
when the last hour of the Last Lewis has arrived
he passes away with a calembour.

After all, it is not so much a man or a race, this
odious Bourbonism, as a kind of false spirit or
faith. There are hints of it in other countries.
Wherever there is an old-fashioned immovable
mulishness, that is cruel and pitiless, that will
listen to no advice, that sticks by old shams and
effete forms, there is Bourbonism more or less.
The grand feature of all is, that whatever be
the cruel teaching, they LEARN NOTHING. That
biting Talleyrand wrote their epitaph: THEY
HAVE LEARNT NOTHING—FORGOTTEN NOTHING.
This is the moral to be drawn from the story of
THE LAST LEWISES.

                         NEW WORK
    BY SIR EDWARD BULWER LYTTON.

                         NEXT WEEK
   Will be continued (to be completed in six months)
                  A STRANGE STORY,
                            BY THE
  AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," " RIENZI," &c. &c.