"Oh, you quite reassure me." And he went away laughing. "Now for me, monsieur," said the countess, trembling. "You, beautiful countess, shun the Place Louis XV." "Alas!" said the countess, "one day already I lost myself there; that day I suffered much. I nearly lost my head." "Ah, well, countess, this time you will lose it and never find it again."

Madame Dubarry uttered a cry and left the room, and Cagliostro was about to follow her, when Richelieu stopped him.

"One moment," said he; "there remains only Taverney and I, my dear sorcerer."

"Monsieur de Taverney begged me to say nothing, and you, marshal, have asked me nothing."

66

Oh, I do not wish to hear," again cried Taverney.

"But come, to prove your power, tell us something that only Taverney and I know," said Richelieu.

"What?" asked Cagliostro, smiling.

"Tell us what makes Taverney come to Versailles, instead of living quietly in his beautiful house at Maison-Rouge, which the king bought for him three years ago."

"Ten

"Nothing more simple, marshal," said Cagliostro. years ago, Monsieur de Taverney wished to give his daughter, Mademoiselle Andrée, to the King Louis XV., but he did not succeed."

"Oh!" growled Taverney.

"Now, monsieur wishes to give his son, Philippe de Taverney, to the Queen Marie Antoinette; ask him if I speak the truth."

"On my word," said Taverney, trembling, "this man is a sorcerer; devil take me if he is not!"

"Do not speak so cavalierly of the devil, my old comrade," said the marshal.

"It is frightful," murmured Taverney, and he turned to implore Cagliostro to be discreet, but he was gone.

"Come, Taverney, to the drawing-room," said the marshal, "or they will drink their coffee without us.'

But when they arrived there the room was empty; no one had courage to face again the author of these terrible predictions.

The wax lights burned in the candelabra, the fire burned on the hearth, but all for nothing.

"Ma foi, old friend, it seems we must take our coffee têteà-tête. Why, where the devil has he gone?" Richelieu looked all around him, but Taverney had vanished like the rest. "Never mind," said the marshal, chuckling as Voltaire might have done, and rubbing his withered though still white hands; "I shall be the only one to die in my bed. Well, Count Cagliostro, at least I believe. In my bed! that was it;

I shall die in my bed, and I trust not for a long time. Holla! my valet de chambre and my drops."

The valet entered with the bottle, and the marshal went with him into the bedroom.

MISTAKES, METHODS, AND CRIMES OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

BY EDMUND BURKE.

(From "Reflections on the Revolution in France.")

[EDMUND BURKE, British orator and political philosopher, was born in Dublin, Ireland, January 12, 1729. He gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1746; in 1750 went to London to study law, but never was called to the bar; became noted in literary and theatrical circles, and in 1756 published his "Vindication of Natural Society," in answer to Bolingbroke, and the treatise on "The Sublime and the Beautiful." In 1759 he became private secretary to "Single speech" William Gerard Hamilton, but a few years later quarreled with and left him. In 1764 he became a member of the famous club with Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Reynolds, etc. In 1765 he was appointed private secretary to Lord Rockingham, just made first lord of the treasury, and was shortly returned to Parliament. His speeches are part of the enduring monuments of English literature. In 1769 he published his pamphlets, "Observations on a Late Publication (George Grenville's) on the Present State of the Nation"; and in 1770 "Thoughts on the Present Discontents." He was made privy councilor and paymaster of the forces in 1782. For several years from 1783, he was occupied with the affairs of India, the prosecution of Warren Hastings, etc. Late in 1789 he wrote "Reflections on the Revolution in France," issued a year later; in 1796, "Letters on a Regicide Peace." He died July 9, 1797.]

You will observe that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity, as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other

more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity who never look back to their ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of government. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, molding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties ; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth

of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchers, and our altars.

Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its galleries of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political

world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions; they render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations; and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, forever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; and you have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of lowborn servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In order to furnish, at the expense of your honor, an excuse to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed, and ill fitted. Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have you thought, what I, for one, always thought you, a generous and gallant nation, long misled to your disad vantage by your high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honor, and loyalty; that events had been unfavorable to you.