The history of France since the Revolution affords some striking illustrations of these remarks.  The same man was a servant of the Republic, of Bonaparte, of Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again after his return from Elba, of Lewis again after his return from Ghent.  Yet all these manifold treasons by no means seemed to destroy his influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his character.  We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his countrymen did not seem to be shocked; and in truth they had little right to be shocked:  for there was scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the state or in the army, who had not, according to the best of his talents and opportunities, emulated the example.  It was natural, too, that this should be the case.  The rapidity and violence with which change followed change in the affairs of France towards the close of the last century had taken away the reproach of inconsistency, unfixed the principles of public men, and produced in many minds a general scepticism and indifference about principles of government.

No Englishman who has studied attentively the reign of Charles the Second, will think himself entitled to indulge in any feelings of national superiority over the Dictionnaire des Girouttes.  Shaftesbury was surely a far less respectable man than Talleyrand; and it would be injustice even to Fouche to compare him with Lauderdale.  Nothing, indeed, can more clearly show how low the standard of political morality had fallen in this country than the fortunes of the two British statesmen whom we have named.  The government wanted a ruffian to carry on the most atrocious system of misgovernment with which any nation was ever cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the drowning of women, by the frightful torture of the boot.  And they found him among the chiefs of the rebellion and the subscribers of the Covenant.  The opposition looked for a chief to head them in the most desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on any English administration; and they selected the minister who had the deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war.  The whole political drama was of the same cast.  No unity of plan, no decent propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild and monstrous harlequinade.  The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish noblemen and gentlemen in the other.  Public opinion has its natural flux and reflux.  After a violent burst, there is commonly