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380 MADAME SWETCHINE.
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
— I .— In Our Last Number We Reviewed Th...
of convulsion or of battle in all parts of Europe had left to the partisans of despotism and liberalism but little distinction in their
cause for mourning . It is not , therefore , to be wondered at that Madame Swetchine should entertain sincere _hoj ) es of the results of
the restored Bourbon rule . That at least had root in the noblest traditions of France ; thatif it could be guided by the freer spirit of
, the age and by the lessons learnt in exile , possessed an organic raison d ' etre . It is all very well for the English , than whom no
people are more firmly linked in practical ways to their own historical pastto fling themselves theoretically on the opposite side ,
, and imagine it possible to reconstitute the moral life of a people by the creating and carrying out of a new constitution ; the new
constitution may be excellent , but it has one capital defect , it will not work , or at least it -will not work with the particular human
material for which it was arbitrarily designed . It is exactly parallel to _imposing an external rule of good conduct on an ill-educated ,
ill-disciplined adult ; the man will not or cannot obey . If in England at the present moment all our traditions -were uprooted ; if the
throne w _^ ere vacant , or filled by a military general like Marlborough or Wellington ; if the irregular boundaries of our dear old English
counties were all straightened , and the land cut up into square or oblong _dej ) artments , so that the names of Northumberland and
Kent ceased to be familiar in the mouths of men ; if the local centres of national life , Gloucester and Birmingham , Manchester
and York , the relies of antiquity and the resorts of modern trade , were alike held clown by armed force or checked by the incessant
action of a centralised police ; if a population which had escaped from , provincial massacres or metropolitan civil murder , _were
decimated by military levies in the flower of their age , and no man knew who would reign or what would happen next—then we can
, conceive that even Lord John Russell might welcome the advent of a Stuart or a Tudor as one _fix . ed point amidst the chaos , and that a
Bjced inheritance from a tomb in Westminster Abbey would seem a point from which the wholesome liberty of a distracted country might
in the course of long years be evolved . And so it was that many wise and noble hearts , by no means indifferent to the truest welfare of
their fellows , rejoiced in the fresh re-blossoming of the Flenr-de-Lys , —in the unfurling of the _orinainme of St . Louis of France once more ;
and is it for us , for us who in 1860 see a far more rigid and rootless despotism established in the Tuileries , and Paris degraded by a
court which possesses neither the poetry of tradition nor the ardent and pious charity of many of Madame Swetchine ' s personal friends
among the old regime , to say that those who hoped much from the restoration of the ancient monarchy were blindly and wholly wrong ?
Her residence in Paris was not immediately permanent ; the machinations of enemies at the court of St . Petersburgh caused her
husband to go back for about a year ; but in 1818 lie returned once
more to Paris , and never to the end of bis life visited Russia again ,
380 Madame Swetchine.
380 MADAME SWETCHINE .
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Aug. 1, 1860, page 380, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01081860/page/20/
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