Nicholas.—Republic indeed! I have ordered it to be a crime in France to utter this odious name. President forsooth! we have directed him hitherto; let him now keep his way. Our object was to stifle the spirit of freedom: we tossed the handkerchief to him, and he found the chloroform. Every thing is going on in Europe exactly as I desire; we must throw nothing in the way to shake the machine off the rail. It is running at full speed where no whistle can stop it. Every prince is exasperating his subjects, and exhausting his treasury in order to keep them under due control. What nation on the continent, mine excepted, can maintain for two years longer its present war establishment? And without this engine of coercion what prince can be the master of his people? England is tranquil at home; can she continue so when a foreigner would place a tiara over her crown, telling her who shall teach and what shall be taught. Principally, that where masses are not said for departed souls, better it would be that there were no souls at all, since they certainly must be damned. The school which doubts it is denounced as godless.
Nesselrode.—England, sire, is indeed tranquil at home; but that home is a narrow one, and extends not across the Irish channel. Every colony is dissatisfied and disturbed. No faith has been kept with any of them by the secretary now in office. At the Cape of Good Hope, innumerable nations, warlike and well-armed, have risen up simultaneously against her; and, to say nothing of the massacres in Ceylon, your Majesty well knows what atrocities her Commissioner has long exercised in the Seven Isles. England looks on and applauds, taking a hearty draught of Lethe at every sound of the scourge.
Nicholas.—Nesselrode! You seem indignant. I see only the cheerful sparks of a fire at which our dinner is to be dressed; we shall soon sit down to it; Greece must not call me away until I rise from the dessert; I will then take my coffee at Constantinople. The crescent ere long will become the full harvest-moon. Our reapers have already the sickles in their hands.
Nesselrode.—England may grumble.
Nicholas.—So she will. She is as ready now to grumble as she formerly was to fight. She grumbles too early; she fights too late. Extraordinary men are the English. They raise the hustings higher than the throne; and, to make amends, being resolved to build a new palace, they push it under an old bridge. The Cardinal, in his way to the Abbey, may in part disrobe at it. Noble vestry-room! where many habiliments are changed. Capacious dovecote! where carrier-pigeons and fantails and croppers, intermingled with the more ordinary, bill and coo, ruffle and smoothen their feathers, and bend their versicolor necks to the same corn.
From Bentley's Miscellany for July.
LONDON, PARIS, AND NEW-YORK.
Standing in the City Hall, New-York, and drawing from that point a circle whose radius shall be three miles, we embrace a population of three-quarters of a million. We say this at the outset, by way of securing respect for our theme.
New-York is a mere Jonah's gourd or Jack the Giant-killer's beanstalk compared with London. London was London when St. Paul was a prisoner in Rome, ten years before the destruction of Jerusalem. Sixteen hundred years afterwards, when New-York was but just named, London lost some seventy thousand inhabitants by the plague, and more than thirteen thousand houses by the Great Fire, and hardly missed them.