Act otherwise! and do you know where it will lead to? Place titled incapacity in conspicuous situations, and you will arrive at the very point which you wish to avoid !* Make persons ministers on account of their rank, in the present state of opinion and intelligence, and you will find that the people will look with distrust and loathing on men of rank in spite of their ability.

Let us beware how we tread, even lightly in this course! Let us beware how we inspire the belief that a lord is made a minister at home, or an ambassador abroad merely because he is a lord. Let us, in God's name, beware how we allow it for an instant to be supposed that any family, or set of families pretend to make an hereditary estate of the public service!

But, at last it appears that some change is really to take place in our post-office arrangements; that there are some individuals penetrating enough to perceive, through the opaque bodies of frowning clerks, that the gratification

The Duc de St. Simon, who tried the experiment, acknowledges that nothing was so likely to hasten the movement he wished to prevent-as the failure of his scheme, if it were defeated-and the public exhibition of good men testifying their incapacity in great places.

of a few luxurious gentlemen is not all the benefit that can be derived from an interchange of daily opinion between France and England.*

And now, at the moment when French journals arrive more cheaply to our hands, let us enquire into their character and their influence; the opinions and the classes they represent; and the advantages and the causes of a general newspaper system altogether different from our

* See appendix for what has been done.

†These are the principal newspapers of Paris, and but

a short time since the newspapers of Paris formed the

If you happen to see, sitting in one of the classic chairs of the Palais Royal, a little grocer with rather a pinched in mouth and a pair of dusky brown spectacles-or if you happen to see a good, fat, red-faced dealer in sausages with just sufficient wrinkles about the eye-brow to shew a kind of lurking anxiety to have something-besides an ill-natured wife to find fault with-if you happen, I say, to see either of these gentlemen particularly busy over a paper some fine summer evening in the Palais Royal, be sure that paper is-the Constitutionnel!

The Constitutionnel took its birth at the restoration, and was founded by MM. B. Constant, Etienne, Jay, etc. The shares, ori

French press. Since the revolution the number of provincial journals has very considerably increased :—partly owing to the long provincial agitation by which the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty was preceded; partly owing to the commercial movement which has lately taken place in France, and which, awakening attention to local affairs, teaches men to benefit the state in improving their own canton or their own commune.

The principal provincial newspapers are:

Journal de Rouen,

Précurseur de Lyon,

Mémorial Bordelais,

and the journals of Nantes, Marseilles, and Hâvre.

ginally worth 5,000 francs are now worth 2, or 300,000, and produce frequently upwards of 20,000 francs a year.

The immense advance of this paper gives an interest to the manner in which it is conducted. This manner is a peculiar one. Let us transport ourselves into a large room, where a number of people are assembled, all shouting, spouting, disputing!-Let us listen! the value of an opinion is discussed, as the value of rice, indigo, or any other marketable commodity might be. Here we are amidst the shareholders of the Constitutionnel, who thus debate, week by week, the best course for the paper to adopt-i. e. the course most likely to please its readers.

Those readers are what would be called in France la petite bourgeoisie,* a class singularly averse to great changes and never quite satisfied with what exists. A class that requires in its journal a mixture of satire and plain sense -but of that kind of plain sense which is mixed up with a tolerable share of popular prejudice. For the small French shopkeepers there are but two colours-black and white. The devil, for them, has still immense horns and a

* The small shopkeepers.

long swishy tail. There is no idea to which they do not give some material form, or with which they do not connect some pet or popular name. To please these good folks you must paint in your expressions, and here is where the Constitutionnel has always been most successful." Les Jésuites à robe courte,' "les seïdes du pouvoir," such were the terms in which this journal spoke of that awful sect, the hobgoblin of the restoration! Never did there rise a morning that it did not hold forth upon the disciples of Loyola and their dire machinations; while the chuckling citizen felt a selfconceited pleasure in hearing of the great power, and the terrible plans of his mysterious enemy. The Constitutionnel has another quality not to be forgotten. It is the best teller of a murder, out and out, among its cotemporaries. It dwells upon every horrible particular -it dilates and gloats upon every abominable fact-it would have lived a century on Thurtell's murder or the Cock Lane ghost-—a strong proof, by the bye, of what I said in speaking of the drama, viz. that a taste for horrible tales and terrible spectacles results rather from a coarseness of manners than a depravity of morals.

I observed, a few minutes since, that the petite bourgeoisie are averse to all great changes,