life. There you see everywhere the pomp of war in the midst of peace, as in America you saw everywhere peace in the midst of civil war. The images of war and conquest are constantly kept before the eyes of a people naturally full of military vanity, and now, by the decay alike of religious and political faith, almost entirely bereft of all other aspirations. There is at the same time a vast standing army, which is not occupied, as the army of the Roman Empire was, in defending the frontiers, nor, as the Austrian army is, in holding down disaffected provinces, and which is full of the memory of the Napoleonic conquests, and longs again to overrun and pillage Europe in the name of "glory." There is no restraining influence either of morality or of religion to keep the war spirit in check. The French priesthood are as ready as any priests of Jupiter or Baal to bless national aggression, if by so doing they can gain political power. In what can all this end? In what but a European war? The children in the schools of the Christian Brothers are no doubt faithfully taught the precepts of a religion of peace; but there is a teaching of a different kind before their eyes, which, it is to be feared, they more easily imbibe and less easily forget.
It was amusing, on this and other occasions, to see the state which surrounds the subordinate officials of the Empire. I had found the head of the American Republic and all its armaments without any insignia of dignity, without a guard or attendants, in a common office room. And here was a sous-préfet parading the streets in solemn state, in a gilded coat, and with a line of bayonets glittering on either hand.
From Avranches it is a pleasant walk (by the country road) to the village of Ducie, where there is good fishing, a nice little village inn, and a deserted chateau in the Louis Quatorze style, and of sumptuous dimensions, which, if it was ever completely finished, is now in a state of great dilapidation. No doubt it shared the fate of its fellows, when the Revolution proclaimed "peace to the cottage, war to the castle." The peasantry almost everywhere rose, like galley-slaves whose chains had been suddenly struck off, and gutted the chateaux, the strongholds of feudal extortion and injustice. How violent and sweeping have been the revolutions of this people compared with those of the stronger and more self-controlled race! In England, the Tudor mansions, and not unfrequently even the feudal castles, are still tenanted by the heirs, or by those who have peacefully purchased from the heirs, of their ancient lords; and the insensible gradations by which the feudal guard-room has softened down into the modern drawing-room, and the feudal moat into the flower-garden, are emblematic of the continuous and comparatively tranquil progress of English history. In France, how different! Scarcely eighty years have passed since the Chateau de Montgomeri was proud and gay; since the village idlers gathered here to see its lord, and his little provincial court, assemble along those mouldering balustrades, and ride through the now deserted gates. But to the grandchildren of those villagers the chateau is a strange, mysterious relic of the times before the flood. A group of peasants tried in vain, when I asked them, to recollect the name of its former proprietors. One of them said that it had been inhabited by a great lord, who shod his horses with shoes of gold,—much the sort of tale that an Irish peasant tells you about the primeval monuments of his country. The mansions of France before the Revolution belong as completely to the past as the tombs of the Pharaohs. The old aristocracy and the old dynasty are no longer hated or regretted. Their names excite no emotion whatever in the French peasant's heart. They are wiped out of the memory of the nation, and their place knows them no more. In the midst of their shows and their pleasures and their shallow philosophies, they could not read the handwriting on the wall, and therefore they are blotted out of existence. They went on marrying and giving in marriage; this cha-
