Those who were only spectators, there found sufficient subject for reflection; the restless and factious sought to regulate their conduct by the example of their neighbours. When we perceive the Parliament of Paris, during the troubles excited by the Fronde party, which opposed the Court, forcing the Queen Regent to fly from the capital, and to wander from province to province with the young King, who was then a minor; when we behold this assembly of lawyers appointing generals, levying troops, all at once establishing a tax and a military conscription, and in short declaring every thing that belonged to the Court-party to be lawful plunder, at the same time seizing upon the King's private purse to enable them to wage war against him. When these things meet our view, what do we see in the Assembled Chambers of Paris, but a weak imitation of the two Houses of Parliament assembled at Westminster? For what difference is there between the commission of Lord High Admiral, given to the Earl of Warwick in 1642, by the two Houses of the Long Parliament, and that of General in Chief, with which, in 1649, the Duke of Bouillon was invested by the Grand Chamber of the Parisian Parliament; between the City Militia of London, embodied by an act of the former, and the Cavalry of the Great Gates,

raised by an arret of the latter? Or what in effect does the plunder of the delinquents to the amount of an hundred thousand pounds sterling, on the one side, differ from that confiscation of the property of the courtiers, which amounted to twelve hundred thousand livres tournois, on the other?

The difference, notwithstanding the equivocal sense of the word, was that which subsisted between a Parliament of Judges, who, holding their office by the authority of the King, dared to take up arms against him; and a National Parliament, that, calling itself the sacred deposit of all the rights of the English people, pretended to defend them against the abuses of regal power. It was such a difference as distinguished the vanity of Counsellor Quatre-sous, who contented himself with having purchased with his situation the privilege of calling the great Condé a Faquin*, from the profound sagacity of the Deputy Pym, who warned the noble-minded Strafford, the day on which he declared for the King, that he would pursue him till he brought him to the scaffold; in which he was as good as his word.

*An unprincipled fellow.

In matters of this sort, it is of great importance to check the first beginnings. The British House of Commons was not always so powerful as it became in the reign of the unhappy Charles I.; the arrest of several of its members, in the time of Elizabeth, did not produce the least commotion in London, although the forcible seizure of the Counseller Broussel caused all Paris to rise. Louis XIV. when scarcely of age, and having already made one campaign, hastened to put a stop to the very first efforts of civil disturbances, and all these parliamentary pretensions at once; lest, from being at first only ridiculous in themselves, they might in time become formidable to others. He was no more than seventeen years of age, and had but a few days before come from the trenches at Stenay, to the chateau at Vincennes; when, one morning, as he was getting ready for the chase, he learned that the Chambers of Parliament had met for the purpose of passing a vote of censure on some of his edicts: he repaired instantly to the palace, and, without changing his dress, booted, and with his whip in his hand, entered the Grand Chamber, where he was not at all expected, and addressed the members in the following concise speech, which was not forgotten during the

whole of his reign:

"The disasters your assem"blies have brought upon the kingdom are already well known; I command that the pre"sent, called together to censure my edicts, be "dissolved. Mr. President, I forbid you to suf"fer these assemblies to be continued, or any of you members to desire it."

So determined a speech, it was necessary he should justify by his actions; this he soon did, in the most ample manner. He dazzled the nation by the splendour of his glorious achievements, taught it to exult in his power, charmed it by his splendid entertainments, regulated it by his laws, and enriched it by his marine. About the same time the three British kingdoms recalled Charles II. to the throne of his ill-fated father; he was received at Dover by twenty thousand of his subjects on their knees, and shedding tears of joy. This triumph of royalty chased away all those novel ideas, which the English, by their civil war, and short-lived republic, had created in the minds of some of their neighbours.

These ideas were revived in France when the dethroned James II. retreated thither; and received greater strength from the peculiar kind.

of controversy which he kept up, at a distance, with his revolted subjects, as well as from those fruitless attempts which the Monarch, who had granted him protection, made in his favour. It was then that Louis XIV. was unhappy: he had been unjust; men of an intolerant spirit had rendered him cruel, or rather had themselves been so under the sanction of his authority, by concealing their abuse of it from his knowledge; for it is certain that Louis was deceived throughout the whole of this odious war, waged against opinions and consciences. Notwithstanding that five hundred thousand Frenchmen were driven by it out of their native country, for no other crime than their religion, and one million of their brethren remained in France under the rod of persecution. Notwithstanding children were torn from the breasts of their mothers; women violated in the arms of their husbands; the ministers of the church hung up on gibbets, or seen expiring in the flames; while whole families, and even communities, were exterminated by a ferocious soldiery. Enormities which filled all Europe with outcry and imprecation; so horrid was the abuse of sovereign power. And, if the spirit of resentment did not shew itself so openly on the very theatre of all this injustice, it was not less deeply rooted, although