Essays and Criticism
by St George Jackson Mivart (9780217210423)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: gent in character, acting in opposite ways from most opposite motives, are here shown to have unconsciously concurred in bringing about the same calamitous result. We can recall no character in all past history who so gratuitously ruined his own cause and that of his friends, almost at the very instant of fruition, as did the Comte de Chambord. He was the main founder of the present French Republic. Its second author was M. Thiers. We read in these pages, with increasing wonder, authentic revelations of the lamentable vanity, weakness, and shortsightedness of the latter. From 1830 to 1880, his defects of character have been most fatal to France, and yet it must be affirmed that, but for the action of the Count de Chambord himself, M. Thiers would have performed an act of self- abnegation which might have gone far to compensate for the errors of his earlier years, and have saved him from the moral degradation which attended the end of his career. We see depicted in these pages how, after the Revolution of 1848 and the disasters of 1870, the most enlightened and patriotic Frenchmen united, with extraordinary unanimity and accord, in an endeavour to found a stable system of free government ?as we understand it in England?and how in each case one or two persons, on whose action all depended, ruined everything by their vanity or folly. Every Englishman who reads this book must feel that he has indeed cause to be both grateful to Providence, and proud of his country, which has so long been happily preserved from calamity by the good sense and moderation of most of its politicians, and especially from that combination of opposite extremes which has again and again proved so fatal to the prosperity of France. M. de Falloux was born at Angers on the 7th of May 1811, in a small house ...

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