1774.

receive the applause of the pit; then returned to Versailles, to tell the King that he brought him the homage of the public; went back to Paris, four days after, to be present, concealed

in the private box of the Grand-Chamber, at the 12th Nov. Bed of Justice, where Louis XVI. re-established, in person, all those tribunals which Louis XV. had abolished, and abolished all those which Louis XV. had established, finally leaving himself at the mercy of the very men, whom his predecessor had solemnly declared he should never forgive.

The exile of Maupeou may be easily accounted for. It was impossible that the uncontaminated uprightness of the young Monarch should, without repugnance, suffer the approach of a ministry of prostitution. Morality was not yet to be sacrificed to talent; their union might and ought to have been effected.

We know too, that the recall of the Parliaments was a question pregnant with much difficulty; indeed, much might be advanced as to the advantages and the dangers of such a project, for they were both of magnitude. The Parliaments, whose proceedings had long been violent and unjust, had, at last, themselves experienced an act of injustice, vehement and lasting. That individual interest, however, which they were able to attach to their cause, weak and inefficient as it must have been without other co-operation, became of eventful importance when the public interest was united with it. The idea of blending the former and the new magistracy had before occurred, even to him by whom the first had been banished, and the second summoned. It had been tried, and had succeeded in some provinces. The project had been formed for the capital also, and was already far advanced in its execution.

But to substitute, on a sudden, the combina- Mirotions of a Miromesnil, the keeper of the great seal, for the schemes of a Maupeou; to invest a mind so weak as the former, with powers to reestablish what a soul so resolute as the latter had abolished; to decree a triumph, when pardon ought to have been vouchsafed; to suffer a whole body to assemble, without the smallest check upon pretensions, which they had ever peremptorily insisted upon, and were now about to exercise with a spirit of resentment which they never would cease to foster; to reinstate them even in the

abuses of their power, even in that venality of places, which in its outset degrades, and in its effect corrupts justice; to restore them to that extent of judiciary authority, by which the fate of those within their jurisdiction, was made a secondary object to the convenience of the judges; thus to revoke all that was salutary in the operations of Maupeou, the suppression of sugar-plumbs, épices, a word one is ashamed to mention even on the bare mention of it, and that happy distribution of superior councils, which in common law brought the Courts nearer to the clients, and in criminal justice tended to lessen the number of crimes by the promptness of punishment; in short, after having rewarded revolt, to punish submission; not only inflict privation, but even to heap ingratitude upon repeated outrage, on those Magistrates, who reluctantly, and from a mere sense of duty, had repaired to the assistance of their Sovereign, and taken their places, precisely as he had marked them out for them, in his new tribunals, with scrupulous exactness fulfilling their duty, and disappointing, by the integrity of their conduct, the malevolent eagerness of those who watched for an opportunity of exclaiming against them; to act thus was to pursue a line of conduct, respecting which there cannot possibly exist two opinions. If taken in a moral point of view, it was a wilful forgetfulness of all the restraining principles of justice and of honour; it was a political anomaly, an absolute delirium, which posterity will scarcely conceive possible, and will never prevail upon itself to forgive; and, to sum up the whole, it constituted the first link in that chain of immediate facts, in which we are to look for the causes of the overthrow of France.

The first thing the Parliament did, after its reestablishment, was to protest, the very next day, against the edict by which it had been renewed; against the forms of the Bed of Justice, in which the King had once more called it into existence; and against that phantom of precaution, which Miromesnil had weakly persuaded himself would prove an invincible safeguard. The doctrine held at the Palace was, that the Parliament had never ceased to exist in its members, though deprived of their privileges, dispersed, and reimbursed; that the edict of restoration had in no degree been necessary to its existence, but had, on the contrary, trespassed on its rights. The King had, by this edict, suppressed the Chamber of requests, but found himself obliged, nine

months after, to revoke the suppression; anxi ous, likewise, to put an end to all old dissentions, he commanded that every thing should be forgotten, and all that had passed be never again mentioned: notwithstanding which, in all the courts of the kingdom, the Magistrates who had consented to take their seats in the new Parliament, met with the severest vexations from their compeers. The King, in 1776, chose Mr. Turgot for his confidential Minister, whom, in 1782, Mr. Necker succeeded. The former gave umbrage to the Parliament, by the abolition of the corvée, the latter by the institution of the provincial assemblies. The King was constrained to dismiss both these ministers; and, lastly, his Majesty forbade his courts, when they were re-established, to give in their resignation upon pain of forfeiture. Four years after, however, on the 4th of September, 1778, the Parliament of Rouen sent its resignation into the King, prefaced with several remonstrances, in which they were bold enough to paraphrase the famous line,

"L'injustice à la fin produit l'indépendence."
Oppression in the event dissolves obedience.

It was in this very year that the Anglo-American colonies, having declared themselves independent