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