at all wonderful that both he and his ministers, giving way abundantly in other respects to innovation, should take up in policy with the tradition of their monarchy.  Under his ancestors, the monarchy had subsisted, and even been strengthened, by the generation or support of republics.  First, the Swiss republics grew under the guardianship of the French monarchy.  The Dutch republics were hatched and cherished under the same incubation.  Afterwards, a republican constitution was, under the influence of France, established in the Empire, against the pretensions of its chief.  Even whilst the monarchy of France, by a series of wars and negotiations, and lastly by the Treaties of Westphalia, had obtained the establishment of the Protestants in Germany as a law of the Empire, the same monarchy under Louis the Thirteenth had force enough to destroy the republican system of the Protestants at home.

Louis the Sixteenth was a diligent reader of history.  But the very lamp of prudence blinded him.  The guide of human life led him astray.  A silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and prepared it.  It became of more importance than ever what examples were given, and what measures wore adopted.  Their causes no longer lurked in the recesses of cabinets or in the private conspiracies of the factious.  They were no longer to be controlled by the force and influence of the grandees, who formerly had been able to stir up troubles by their discontents and to quiet them by their corruption.  The chain of subordination, even in cabal and sedition, was broken in its most important links.  It was no longer the great and the populace.  Other interests were formed, other dependencies, other connections, other communications.  The middle classes had swelled far beyond their former proportion.  Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great in society, these classes became the seat of all the active politics, and the preponderating weight to decide on them.  There were all the energies by which fortune is acquired; there the consequence of their success.  There were all the talents which assert their pretensions, and are impatient of the place which settled society prescribes to them.  These descriptions had got between the great and the populace; and the influence on the lower classes was with them.  The spirit of ambition had taken possession of this class as violently as ever it had done of any other.  They felt the importance of this situation.  The correspondence of the moneyed and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of academies, but above all, the press, of which they had in a manner entire possession, made a kind of electric communication everywhere.  The press, in reality, has made every government, in its spirit, almost democratic.  Without the great, the first movements in this revolution could not, perhaps, have been given.  But the spirit of ambition, now for the first time connected with the spirit of speculation, was not to be restrained