’You accuse, in the second place, all the Royalist parties of dislike of England.

’Do you suppose that you are more popular with the others?  That the Republicans love your aristocracy, or the Imperialists your freedom?  The real friends of England are the friends of her institutions.  They are the body, small perhaps numerically, and now beaten down, of those who adore Constitutional Liberty.  They have maintained the mutual good feeling between France and England against the passions of the Republicans and the prejudices of the Legitimists.  I trust, as you trust, that this good feeling is to continue, but it is on precisely opposite grounds.  My hopes are founded, not on the permanence, but on the want of permanence, of the Empire.  I do not believe that a great nation will be long led by its tail instead of by its head.  My only fear is, that the overthrow of this tyranny may not take place early enough to save us from war with England, which I believe to be the inevitable consequence of its duration.’

We left Paris soon after this conversation.

[The following are a few extracts from the article in the ’North British Review.’—­ED.]

’The principal parties into which the educated society of Paris is divided, are the Imperialists, Royalists, Republicans, and Parliamentarians.

’The Royalists maybe again subdivided into Orleanists, Legitimists, and Fusionists; and the Fusionists into Orleanist-Fusionists, and Legitimist-Fusionists.

’The Imperialists do not require to be described.  They form a small party in the salons of Paris, and much the largest party in the provinces.

’Those who are Royalists without being Fusionists are also comparatively insignificant in numbers.  There are a very few Legitimists who pay to the elder branch the unreasoning worship of superstition; who adore Henri V. not as a means but as an end; who pray for his reign, not for their own interests, not for the interests of France, but for his own sake; who believe that he derives his title from God, and that when the proper time comes God will restore him; and that to subject his claims to the smallest compromise—­to admit, for instance, as the Fusionists do, that Louis Philippe was really a king, and that the reign of Henri V. did not begin the instant that Charles X. expired—­would be a sinful contempt of Divine right, which might deprive his cause of Divine assistance.

’There are also a very few Orleanists who, with a strange confusion of ideas, do not perceive that a title founded solely on a revolution was destroyed by a revolution; that if the will of the people was sufficient to exclude the descendants of Charles X., it also could exclude the descendants of Louis Philippe; and that the hereditary claims of the Comte de Paris cannot be urged except on the condition of admitting the preferable claims of the Comte de Chambord.