Of these the most powerful and dangerous remains to be noticed; and, indeed, had the Bourbons adopted judicious measures concerning the army, it is very probable that the alarms of the other classes now alluded to might have subsided.  The Allies, in the moment of universal delight and conciliation, restored at once, and without stipulation, the whole of the prisoners who had fallen into their hands during the war.  At least 150,000 veteran soldiers of Buonaparte were thus poured into France ere Louis was well-seated on the throne; men, the greater part of whom had witnessed nothing of the last disastrous campaigns; who had sustained themselves in their exile by brooding over the earlier victories in which themselves had had a part; and who now, returning fresh and vigorous to their native soil, had but one answer to every tale of misfortune which met them:  “These things could never have happened had we been here.”

The conquerors, in their anxiety to procure for Louis XVIII. a warm reception among the French, had been led into other mistakes, which all tended to the same issue.  They had (with some exceptions on the part of Prussia) left the pictures and statues, the trophies of Napoleon’s battles, untouched in the Louvre—­they had not even disturbed the monuments erected in commemoration of their own disgraces.  These instances of forbearance were now attributed by the fierce and haughty soldiery of Buonaparte, to the lingering influence of that terror which their own arms under his guidance had been accustomed to inspire.  Lastly, the concessions to Napoleon himself of his imperial title, and an independent sovereignty almost within view of France, were interpreted in the same fashion by these habitual worshippers of his renown.  The restored King, on his part, was anxious about nothing so much as to conciliate the affections of the army.  With this view he kept together bands which, long accustomed to all the licence of warfare, would hardly have submitted to peace even under Napoleon himself.  Even the Imperial Guard, those chosen and devoted children of the Emperor, were maintained entire on their old establishment; the Legion of Honour was continued as before; the war ministry was given to Soult, the ablest, in common estimation, of Buonaparte’s surviving marshals; and the other officers of that high rank were loaded with every mark of royal consideration.  But these arrangements only swelled the presumption of those whose attachment they were meant to secure.  It was hardly possible that the King of France should have given no military appointments among the nobles who had partaken his exile.  He gave them so few, that they, as a body, began to murmur ere the reign was a month old:  but he gave enough to call up insolent reclamations among those proud legionaries, who in every royalist, beheld an emblem of the temporary humiliation of their own caste.  When, without dissolving or weakening the Imperial (now Royal)