themselves against the impotent foe whom they dreaded—­might furnish food for mirth if we did not remember the real, deep, and widespread misery which found inarticulate but piteous expression in the movement now coming to confusion under the firm assertion of necessary authority.  The disturbances must needs be quieted; but hitherto it has been the glory of our Victorian statesmen to have understood that the grievances which caused them must also be dealt with.  Now that all which could be deemed wise and good in Chartist demands has been conceded, orderly and quietly, the name “Chartism” has utterly lost its dread significance.

[Illustration:  Napoleon III.]

No cruelly vindictive measures of reprisal followed the collapse of the agitation; none indeed were needed.  The revolutionary epidemic, which had spread hitherward from France, found our body politic in too sound a condition, and could not fasten on it; and the subsequent convulsions which shook our great neighbour hardly called forth an answering thrill in England.  The strange transactions of December 1851, by means of which Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Prince-President of the new French republic, succeeded in overthrowing that republic and replacing it by an empire of which he was the head, did indeed excite displeasure and distrust in many minds; and though it was believed that his high-handed proceedings had averted much disorder, the English Government was not prepared at once to accept all the proffered explanations of French diplomacy; but the then foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, by the rash proclamation of his individual approval, committed the Ministry of which he was one to a recognition of the de facto Monarch of France.  This step was but the last of many instances in which Palmerston had acted without due reference to the premier’s or the Sovereign’s opinion—­a course of conduct which had justly displeased the Queen, and had drawn from her grave and pointed remonstrances.  The final transgression led to his resignation; but its effects on our relations with France remained.

Meanwhile the Emperor’s consistent and probably sincere display of goodwill towards England, the apparent complacency with which the French nation acquiesced in his rule, and the outward prosperity accompanying it, did their natural work in conciliating approval, and in making men willing to forget the obscure and tortuous steps by which he had climbed to power.  One day he and France were to pay for these things; but meanwhile he was a popular ruler, accepted and approved by the nation he governed, anxious for its prosperity, and earnest in keeping it friendly with Great Britain, which he had found a hospitable home in the days of his obscurity, which was again to offer an asylum to him in a day of utter disaster and overthrow, and where his life, chequered by vicissitudes stranger than any known to romance, was to come to a quiet close.  It has been the singular fortune of Her