The Sun.
London, England, 1850-08-27 00:00:00

TUESDAY EVENING, AUGUST 27, 1850.

Though in public the King was an incessant and
rather egotistical talker cn ordinary topics of no mo-
ment, yet he spoke but
,little at cabinet councils,
generally listening very attentively.

SPIRIT of the PUBLIC JOURNALS.
FROM THE MORNING PAPERS OF THIS DAY.
TIMES.--:-The closing scene of the life of Louis
Philippe of Orleins, once the Sovereign of a great people,
the soldier of one revolution, the conqueror of a second,
and the victim of a third—of the Prince who seemed to
control the destinies of France and the policy of Europe
at the very moment when a tumult in the streets of
Paris and a mob of madcaps hurled him from the throne
—adds but one brief line to a most eventful history. The
great epoch of his career ended with the 24th of Febru-
ayry, 1848. Thenceforward England has afforded to
him the last services of hospitality—an asylum and a
grave. A stream of great events has hurried us along
with inconceivable velocity from that point at which
Louis Philippe and the world parted company;
but on this solemn occasion, when Death has
placed the irrevocable seal on all the vicissitudes of
his life, we look back to the whole record of his
singular existence and we shall attempt to trace some
faint likeness of his character, when he seemed to have
attained the height of sovereign ambition, rather than in
the confusion cud disgrace of his fall. That, after all,
was the work, almost the accident, of an hour; but the
annals of a reign of nearly 18 years, and the peculiarities
of his character and policy, are imperishable subjects
for the meditation of the statesman and the historian.
Louis Philippe, King of the French, was distinguished
among all the men who have-figured with equal promi-
nence on the stage of history and in the government of
mankind, by the absence of those transcendent powers of
intellect, those inordinate passions, those imposing vir-
tues, or those daring crimes which commonly mark the
annals of human greatness. But for those perilous gifts
of genius and of power he substituted a singular com-
pound of the minor qualities of human nature. Whe-
ther for good or evil, these constituted the large aggre-
gate of his character, and in forming a correct judgment
of this remarkable man it would be equally dangerous
to exalt him into a sage and a lero, or to degrade him
into a selfish oppressor. Good sense, thrift, caution,
knowledge of the world derived from experience rather
than from intuition, patience, self control, and keen
self-interest were the plain materials of a character
which was cast in no heroic mould. These qualities of
the lesser order were dilated in his person to very un-
usual proportions, and applied to very unusual ends;
but they never lust the stamp of what must be termed,
for want of a more appropriate phrase, the vulgarity
of their nature. The impulses of enthusiasm, the glow
of imagination, the pursuit of a great scheme of action,
the indulgence of large sympathies or desires in policy
or in government, were unknown to his character
and to bis reign. On one or two occasions intense
acquisitiveness, animated by an unusual excess of tradi-
tional pride, tempted him to deviate into a passion, and
imitate the policy of the loftiest of his ancestors. Occa-
sionally his aversions prevailed over his better judgment,
and in the last few months of his reign his temper be-
came testy and his resolutions incautious, under the
growing effects of age. But these were exceptions to
the general spirit of his government, and the transac-
tion to which we more particularly allude was wattled
in a web of minute contrivances and intrigues which
seemed partially to conceal from the aged Monarch him-
self the amount of his own rashness, and the conse-
quences of his design. Whenever the history of his
reign is accurately written, it will be found to have
been conducted and regulated by an astonishing adapta•
tion of petty methods to great ends—by carefully avert-
ing those explosions of energy which are apt to dis-
turb the cause they were intended to serve—by an
invariable and ingenious We of all the means
afforded by the current circumstances of the
day—and by lowering the standard of govern-
ment to that of the middle classes of society, instead of
inciting the nation to participate in the triumphs of
military or the excitement of popular power. It was
strange that at any time such methods of government
should enthral the genius of a high-spirited, martial, and
fretful people, and that the French nation should have
surrendered so much of its natural impetuosity to so
homely a spell. But the result has ultimately shown
that the spirit of the nation secretly burned tor other
objects, anti would even brave the excesses of revolution
and the risks of despotism to escape from the temperate
routine of the government of the middle classes. The
highland youth in the shop of Simon the Glover, of
Perth, was not more out of place than the French peo-
ple in the apprenticeship of a limited constitution. It
would be inconsistent with the essential qualities which
we ascribe to Louis Philippe's character to suppose that
at any period of his life he was excited by dreams of vast
ambition, or enabled by constancy of purpose to look on-
wards from the hardships of exile and proscription to
the recovery of the throne of France. For his own hap-
piness—and, we will add, for his greater success—his
aspirations were confined within narrower limits. At
one time, indeed, as in the curious transactions of 1811,
ambition seemed to invite the Duke of Orleans to play a
more active part in the Spanish war; at another, Greece,
and even Mexico, allured him by the phantom of a
throne; but these adventures were not seriously pur-
sued, and he sate down after the restoration of the
Bourbons contented, or at least resigned, to be the first
Prince of the blood in France, and one of the richest per-
sonages in Europe. Yet, even in those uncertain years,
his vigoroas mind was not inactive. He alone of all the
Princes of the House of Bourbon had spent his life in a
contest of policy with the principles of the French Revo-

lution. He !shine had attempted to assume whatever
' garb the spirit of the age imposed on him, and to profit
by the lessons of his past experience. A sterner and
a prouder man would have died a hundred deaths rather
than condescend to humour the popular passions,
which twice in his life uncrowned his nearest rela-
tives, and finally turned upon himself. Louis
Philippe was affected by no such scruples; and no
sooner did he find that terms were proffered to him by
those who might then have driven him into a second
exile, than he ascended the throne under the auspices of
a popular revolution. From that instant his policy
changed; but though the current was turned, its move-
ment was slow, and at first all but insensible. "Mu
lutte tenace centre r anarchic" (to, use tus own expres-
sion) became the settled purpose of his reign. The
dazzling career of a Napoleon, and the blind resistance
of a Charles X., were alike impossible; yet the same, or
even greater results, were to be accomplished by a
sedulous employment of slender but multifarious means;
and those results were supposed to have been accom-
plished so effntually that nut only had the Court and
the Ministry the firmest reliance upon their success, but
even the Republican party had postponed the execution
of its designs until the King's demise. The Revolution
of Februsry was alike uniorseen by all parties, and this
confidence was undoubtedly the cause of the extraordinary
neglect ut the decisive measures which might have pre-
vented it. The military exploits of Louis Philippe were
limited to one campaign under Dumouriez, when he had
not completed his twentieth year, and although he took
a part in the actions of Jemmapes and Valmy, those in-
cidents in his life were only recalled when it was politic
to connect his name with the prowess of the Republican
armies. But of courage on all occasions but the last
and greatest of his life the King displayed no ordinary
share. tie had braved without a trace of hesitation
dangers in comparison with which the heat of battle is a
game. Fur many years of his reign the attempts at as-
aination were so frequently repeated in every imaginable
form that a man of a less hearty courage could hardly
have left his palace gates with indifference. Yet his com-
posure was scarcely ruffled by these hateful crimes, and
without either fatalism or religious enthusiasm he inva-
riably presented a cheerful and resolute presence to his
deadliest enemies. These personal qualities are so well
known that it is the less possible to conceive under the
influence of what panic he absconded from the Tuileries,
when half an hour of resolution at the head of 12,0u0
men who filled the Carrousel would have changed the
issue of his life and the destinies of Europe. But on
that fatal morning the King was no longer himself ; he
was unnerved, he was old, and he fled from the revolu-
tion, leaving everything in the dust. There certainly
the high spirit of the House of Bourbon utterly f sled
him. On all occasions it had been at once his greatest
art and his greatest trial to keep the pride of his royal
race from awakening the hostile passions if the country.
In the interior of the closet and the palace he snowed
himself minutely versed in all that characterised the
lives and policy of his predecessors. A parallel between
himself and Louis XIV., even in personal features, was
one of the points on which his vanity rested with most
complacency. The golden sun gleamed once more
upon the velvet canopy of the throne of France; and it
has been said that no consequences of the revolution
of 1830 were more regretted by the King than the loss
of the fieur delis and of the riband of the Holy Ghost.
Nothing could exceed the minute detail in which
every incident of every subject, past, present, or to
come, presented itself to his mind, and passed under the
scrutiny of his indefatigable industry. His memory
was of the most comprehensive kind, especially as ap-
plied to I ersons and events, for in books he was little
versed; and hence his conversation was extraordinarily
copious and animated. All subjects were alike welcome
to him, and there was nothing on which be had not in-
formation enough to converse or curiosity to inquire.
Yet in all this marvellous display of 'readiness that
magical touch was always wanting which converts the
products of the intellect into the finest forms of elo-
quence or wit ; in the whole range of his daily conver-
sation we know of no recorded instance of one of those
winged words or subtle combinations of language
which lay bare a truth or search a mind; his
love of the arts was profusely cultivated, but it
wanted the delicacy of a refined taste and a
chastened judgment, and all the 4ctivity of his
bustling existence seems not to have added one imperish-
able thought to the world. The same want of elevation
pervaded his moral as well as his intellectual being. To
him great principles were matters of as little concern as
great truths. Perhaps at the bottom the tuition of
Madame de Geniis, the Jacobin Club, and the rough
usage of his early life had left him sceptical of both.
Hence, however, proceeded the greatest errors of his
policy, and the just cause of his final discomfiture. Man
has a larger appetency for truth and rectitude than to be
permanently contented with tricks and expedients. The
principle of the King's reign was to live without his
subjects as best be could. His immediate predecessor
had perished in an attempt to revive the principle of the
French Monarchy as of old, and the principle of the
French Republic was apparently lulled to sleep. All
that could be done was to borrow as much as could be
borrowed with impunity from the one and the ether.
Perhaps from wisdom, perhaps from necessity, per-
hops from personal pride, Louis Philippe contributed
nothing to•the regular estab iahment of a constitutional
Government in France, and he suffered in his own person
the penalty of his personal reign. No Prince less qua-
lified by natural effrontery and long experience could
have played the part which Louis Philippe acted for so
many years. He was the greatest master of what must
be termed the orsft of kings that the world had beheld
• for Ingo than i Qualm; §O4 lie gcltipted the influeuce pf

Royalty, aided by bis own personal dexterity, to the
manners of ecaptious and democratic age. In all par-
' ties, in all professions, in every walk of life, and every
mood of passion, the King loved to practise his powers
of address. Few area within his sphere w( re inacces-
sible to his persuasive ingenuity, and it may be said that
he disarmed more enemies by his tongue than he would
have done by the rigour of persecution. For this pur-
pose the hospitality cf the Tuileries was indiscrimi-
nately- off'red to men of all parties, and the King consi-
dered no affront unpardonable but that of a total I
estrangement from the Court, and no man irreclaim-
able but those who refused to listen to him. In the pur-
suit of his objects by these means he displayed incredible
patience, drollery, and cunning. Even in dealing with
his bitterest enemies—those who were leagued against
his throne, and who had attempted his life, he invaria-
bly observed an admirable clemency, which for the first
time marked a great political revolution. It will be re-
membered when all his other acts aro forgotten that from
the commencement to the end of his reign no blood was
shed but that of convicted assassins, and of some few
deluded insurgents in Pile heat of popular contests. From
all such st Ana the government of Louis Philippe is pure;
and an excessive reluctance to occasion the effusion of
blood was ot e cause of his overthrow and ruin. And if
he renounced the use of these dreadful means sf civil re-
pression, so also did he successsully oppose and avert the
perils sif European war. We have seen that his whole
rlicy was repugnant to the viol, nt measures and the
hazardous adventures of more enterprising minds; but
it is not the less creditable to his name that he should
have persevered through good and evil report in the
that sted'ast adherence to the cause of peace which has
prolonged a million of human lives, averted incalculable
miseries, and strengthened the confidence of nations in
those ties which have, for the first time, grown to ma-
turity between them. A peaceful reign of 17 years
over the most warlike people of Europe, still panting
with the fever of a revolution, and mindful of the re.
verses which closed the last war, is a phenomenon with-
out a parallel in political history; and the merit of him
who accomplished this great work of policy is but the
more conspicuous amidst those apprehensions which
have followed his downfall. He undoubtedly revived
many of those practices which had thrown discredit on

the diplomacy of France in former reigns. His duplicity
was such that nothing but the singular influence of his
conversational powers could have given any value to
his assurances, and he exulted in the success of his
schemes, without the slightest reference to the propriety
of the means which had been employed to serve them.
The inevitable contequence of a government carried on
by these arts was, that the deeper the hold
it seemed to acquire by such practices upon
the party which it could command, the less
it could reckon upon the respect and support of the na-
tion at large; and the more complete the King's personal
system of control became, the less could he have trans-
ferred it to any other hands. It began and ended with
himself. The authority he enjoyed in his own family
was unbounded, and that control which few absolute

monarchs have possessed over the princes of their own
race was complete in the hands of Louis Philippe. lie
owed it to his playful disposition, which even at the
close of his life could lay aside his cares and dignity to
join in the sports of a child. He owed it to the singu-
lar judgment he had shown in the education of his sons,
and not less to their invariable confidence in his indul-
gent solicitude for their welfare. After they had
reached the prime of manhood and assumed the duties
of married life, his sons continued to inhabit the same
palace and to form a part of the Fame domestic circle.
Without any excessive display of paternal authority,
the Royal Family continued wholly dependent on the
King's advice and pleasure, and the divided interests
of a Court were unknown. Nor in this allusion to
the domestic ties of his life must the names of those
be omitted who shed over it the steady light of
conjugal love and sisterly friendship. The purity and
piety of the Queen, to whom ho was devoted with the
most undeviating fidelity and aff< ction, seemed to plead
against the imperfections of his character, while the clear
judgment and decision of Madame Adelaide held as it
were a lamp to his path. It is remarkable that the death
of his sister was so speedily followed by the great catas-
trophe of his reign, and that the Queen alone endea-
voured to prevent the closing and irretrievable fault of
his abdication. These near influences of his family gave
to one portion of his life at least a moral dignity and a
charm of sentiment to which he had no other claim;
and however men may have doubted the sincerity of his
words, there is no reason to question the truth of those
affections. In the more ordinary transactions of life he
bas been accused of an excessive love of money, and it is
true that he judged of the value of human actions and

principles
.13-y ion sordid a standard. ' But he ex-

spendea his- private fortune with great muni-
ficence, the public revenues with prodigality; and
he was less prone to amass money than
to devote it to the purchase of popularity and po-
litical power. When suddenly driven back into exile,
he who had been accused of amassing wealth had barely
the means of obtaining the necessaries of life, and it has
recently been proved, by the publication of the ac-
counts of the civil list, that bis average personal ex-
penses did not exceed 4001. a year. Of all his personal
tastes, that of building was perhaps the strongest, and
the restoration cf the Palace and Museum of Versailles

at his own cost, the emtellishtnent of Paris, and the re-
storation of the antiquities of France are splendid mon-
uments of his reign. Although the administration of
the public finances was inordii,ately profuse, immense
semi were expended
.in public edifices of every kind,
which remain for the ornament and utility of the
country. In Paris alone Louis Philippe terminated all
the great buildings which Napoleon had begun. He
inher.ted from the il,gent Orleans a love of s&erice
,nd even a tas`•e fur medicine ; and he had acquired
in his travels a fondness, not common in a French

Prince, for marine amutemPuti. But the customary
entert.mnments of a C..urt, the chase, military
exercises, and play were comparatively unknown
in his day, and they were sacrificed to the exi-
genci.s of public opinion in a democratic com-

muniry, ever j- alous of the pleasures of Princes. Per
haps in these minute details the character of the marl may
be traced even mere consistently than in hid political
actions. He rose without moral greatness, he reigned
without the affection of his people, and he fell without
the cornras4ion of the world. The last hours of his

reign were a prey to an undignifi‘ d panic; his determina-
tious fluctuated between the extremes of weakness and
absurdity; and in his selfish eagerness to preserve the
unhonoured fragment of a life which no one seriously
menaced, he recoiled from the necessary exercise of
force, and left the French nation exposed to all the
horrors of anarchy. That gre at event dissipated in an
hour the whole fabric of hie lite, and left him despoiled
of all 'het wealth, ambition, power, and artifice could
bestow on man. The deepest lesson of human mutability
which this generation of men had witnessed was com-
plete; and death has mercifully drawn its veil over the
last struggles of old age, enfeebled, uncertain cf the
future, abandoned by the crea'ures of his former bounty,
and vanquished by the revolutionary powers of France
which no living man has yet perteantntly subdued.
POST.—It is impossible to contemplate without fen-
sations of the deepest interest the announcement which
records the death of Louis Philippe. The dignity of
his birth, the tragic horror of his family history, the
vicissitudes and hardships of his individual existence,
the storm and earthquake which shook the earlier por-
tion of his public career—all these things could not have
failed to render his story an eventful one, even had it
wanted those thrilling chapters of its conclusion—the
zenith of exaltation, the ignominious fall—the palace of
the Tuileries, and the retreat of Claremont. Viewing
the whole of these particulars, the closing scene of Louis
Philippe's life strikes us as more emphatically significant
than even that of his predecessor Charles X., with whose
position he contrasted his own on one remarkable
occasion, and whose destiny, so curiously involved
in and parallel to his, mast have frequently fur-
nished food for reflection in the long leisure hours
at Claremont. True it is that the transition of our
ideas, from the youth of the Comte d'Artois, the
gayest of the gay revellers who danced over the frightful
abyss which was to yawn beneath them, to the quiet re-
tirement of the grey discrowned King in his exile at
Gratz, constitutes a survey of startling interest; but the
fortunes t.f Charles X. are of a simple character enough.
Trained in the school of those pleasure-seekers of the
old regime with w hose such ty the bright morning of his
life was so necessarily associated, he could never
thoroughly divest himself of those habits of thought to
which his recollections would naturally cling with
gros.teq fondness, never altogether appreciate the altered
itificences with which he had to deal. It is the ordinary
misfortune, perhaps, of those who are actively engaged
in a "restoration" that they ignore the existence of the'
residuum which is invariably It ft by the retiring ele-
ments of disorder; that, in watching the ebb of the re-
volutionary deluge, they lose sight of the new strata
which it has upheaved. Such, however, was by no
means the case with Louis Phillipe. His training had
been, in the first instance; somewhat different from that
of his royal cousin; it had better prepared him to ac-
commodate himself to the tremendous changes which
swept over his country, and which tested his capabilities
in this respect to the utmost. Again, he was by cir-
cumstances removed from that active participation in the
restored Court of the Bourbons which might, perhaps,
base drizzled his eyes to the same extent as those of the
other branch of his family. But whether it is to be at-
tributed to the force of circumstances, or to his own na-
tural sagacity, certain it is that no man appears to have
better understood the elements with which he had to
deal than Louis Philippe. To none could the task have
been better assigned than to him, of re-constructing
that system of French society which had collapsed in
1830; that is, assuming that the task was to be per-
formed under the same conditions which were imposed
oatritghiant
ofep a dynasty,och.lfpolitical finesse could have secured the
Louis Phillipe would have been
the man to effect it. If a bard, cold, persevering
ramification of intrigue and chicane could have struck
the routs of sovereign power firmly in the soil, the tree
that was planted in the glorious days of July would
have been flourishing now. If a craftily -woven chain
of expediency could have bound the several classes of
the nation to the throne of their own choice, fortune and
seemedaturotis, to have placed such a bend in the hands of
hilippe. But it was not to be. After rev, ',teen
years, the discovery became palpable that monarchy in
France must represent a principle, and not merely a
tact. The first glimmer of that discovery extinguished
the Throne of the Barricades. The Ode aos dynasty shut-
li, d off its regal coil amidst the laughter of all Europe.
Without striking a blow; without saying a word, it sur-
rendered the most complicated and artificial system of
government that was perhaps ever devised, to the most
clumsy and purposeless revolution that ever was at-
tempted. As we involuntarily contrast the career of Louis
Philippe with that of his predecessor, so it is not less
curious to es a'ch it in relation to that of his successor.
But a few years back, the prisoner of Ham lingered be-
hind the bolts and bars of his dungeon, while the Citi-
zen King held royal court in the palace of the French
Sovereigns, and speculated in matrimonial alliances with
half the potentates of Europe. Now, the then prisoner
of Jim camas Iriugionat progrell t>rotn tORI3