always cherished, flowing over his shoulders, while the king sat near him, dressed in his claret-colored coat, brown wig, and varnished boots.  Some one who was present whispered that it was an interview between the last of the ancienne noblesse and the first citizen bourgeois.  Rut the old courtier was touched by the intended kindness, and when the king was about to go away, he said, half rising:  “Sire, this honor to my house will be gratefully remembered in the annals of my family.”

Deep and true was the grief felt for the loss of Talleyrand in his own household; many and bitter have been the things said of his character and his career.  He himself summed up his life in some words written shortly before his death, which read like another verse in the Book of Ecclesiastes:—­

“Eighty-three years have rolled away!  How many cares, how many anxieties!  How many hatreds have I inspired, how many exasperating complications have I known!  And all this with no other result than great moral and physical exhaustion, and a deep feeling of discouragement as to what may happen in the future,—­disgust, too, as I think over the past.”

A writer in “Temple Bar” (probably Dr. Jevons) speaks of Prince Talleyrand thus:—­

“On his private life it would be unfair to pass judgment without taking into consideration the turbulence and lawlessness, the immorality and corruption both social and political, which characterized the stormy epoch in which he was called to play a very prominent part.  If he did not pass through it blameless, he was less guilty than many others; if his hands were not pure, at least they were not blood-stained; and it is possible that, as Bourienne, who knew him well, says:  ’History will speak as favorably of him as his contemporaries have spoken ill.’”

The summer of 1840 seemed peaceful and serene, when a storm burst suddenly out of a cloudless sky.  It was a new phase of that Eastern Question which unhappily was not settled in the days of the Crusades, but has survived to be a disturbing element in the nineteenth century.  Two men were engaged in a fierce struggle in the East, and, as usual, they drew the Powers of the West and North into their quarrel.

Sultan Mahmoud, who had come to the throne in 1808, had done his best to destroy the power of his pashas.  He hated such powerful and insubordinate nobles, and after the destruction of the Mamelukes in 1811, he placed Egypt under the rule of the bold Macedonian soldier, Mehemet Ali, not as a pasha, but as viceroy.  In course of time, as the dominions of Sultan Mahmoud became more and more disorganized by misgovernment and insurrection, Mehemet Ali sent his adopted son, Ibrahim Pasha, with an army into Syria.  Ibrahim conquered that province and governed it far better than the Turks had done, when he was stopped by a Russian army (1832), which, under pretence of assisting the sultan, interfered in the quarrel.  An arrangement was effected by what is called the treaty of Unkiar-Thelessi.  Ibrahim was to retain the pashalik of Syria for his life, and Russia stipulated that no vessels of war should be allowed to pass the Dardanelles or Hellespont without the consent of the sultan.