public opinion of the nation, and the king in his infatuation saw no remedy for his increasing unpopularity but in dissolving the Chamber of Deputies and ordering a new election,—­the blindest thing he could possibly do.  It was now seen that he was determined to rule in utter defiance of the charter he had sworn to defend, and on the principles of undisguised absolutism.  All parties now coalesced against the king and his ministers.  The king then began to tamper with the military in order to establish by violence the old regime.  It was found difficult to fill ministerial appointments, as everybody felt that the ship of State was drifting upon the rocks.  The king even determined to dissolve the new Chamber of Deputies before it met, the elections having pronounced emphatically against his government.

At last the passions of the people became excited, and daily increased in violence.  Then came resistance to the officers of the law; then riots, then barricades, then the occupation of the Tuileries, then ineffectual attempts of the military to preserve order and restrain the violence of the people.  Marshal Marmont, with only twelve thousand troops, was powerless against a great city in arms.  The king thinking it was only an emeute, to be easily put down, withdrew to St. Cloud; and there he spent his time in playing whist, as Nero fiddled over burning Rome, until at last aroused by the vengeance of the whole nation, he made his escape to England, to rust in the old palace of the kings of Scotland, and to meditate over his kingly follies, as Napoleon meditated over his mistakes in the island of St. Helena.

Thus closed the third act in the mighty drama which France played for one hundred years:  the first act revealing the passions of the Revolution; the second, the abominations of military despotism; the third, the reaction toward the absolutism of the old regime and its final downfall.  Two more acts are to be presented,—­the perfidy and selfishness of Louis Philippe, and the usurpation of Louis Napoleon; but these must be deferred until in our course of lectures we have considered the reaction of liberal sentiments in England during the ministries of Castlereagh, Canning, and Lord Liverpool, when the Tories resigned, as Metternich did in Vienna.

Yet the reign of the Bourbons, while undistinguished by great events, was not fruitless in great men.  On the fall of Napoleon, a crowd of authors, editors, orators, and statesmen issued from their retreats, and attracted notice by the brilliancy of their writings and speeches.  Crushed or banished by the iron despotism of Napoleon, who hated literary genius, they now became a new power in France,—­not to propagate infidel sentiments and revolutionary theories, but to awaken the nation to a sense of intellectual dignity and to maturer views of government; to give a new impulse to literature, art, and science, and to show how impossible it is to extinguish the fires of liberty when once kindled in the breasts of patriots, or to put a stop to the progress of the human mind among an excitable, intelligent, though fickle people, craving with passionate earnestness both popular rights and constitutional government in accordance with those laws of progress which form the basis of true civilization.