and a great portion of it built under her immediate superintendence. She resided there the greater portion of her time. Now commence those scenes of cruelty and tyranny at which the mind shudders; not so much at the principal perpetrators for they did but reflect the age-as at the dark and deadly promptings of the mind, at that period. Poor gloomy bigots! they thought that they did the Almighty a service by savagely mutilating his works. Catherine played a prominent part in that dreadful drama-the St. Bartholomew battue. Her hands were stained with blood. How that bold, bad woman pushed her son on to the perpetration of the massacre! It was from the palace-windows of the Tuileries that Charles fired his carbine upon his unoffending subjects; a dreadful example, which was immediately followed, and led to the most frightful slaughter of unarmed and defenceless citizens, that history records. That weak prince was morally murdered by his mother, to suit her own subtle and selfish ambition. She artfully perverted the little goodness he had in his nature; and used every effort to corrupt and enfeeble his mind. He was the victim of her heartless cruelty. Guise, Cardinal Lorraine, and Tavannes,

"Fellows by the hand of nature mark'd,
Quoted, and sign'd, to do a deed of shame.
fit for bloody villany,

Apt, liable, to be employ'd in danger,"

were the fitting instruments for such hands as those of the dark and deadly Catherine, and her cowardly son, to work with, in such a revolting emergency.

Henry IV. appears upon the scene with a kind of halo about him, from the contrast of his character and conduct with that of his gloomy predecessors. The French admire him, and designate him as the good king; but his goodness only appears in relation to extreme badness, for his treatment of Sully, his faithful adviser and steady counsellor, and his vacillating opinions, are not among the qualities which we should call good. It was policy and compulsion that caused him to exhibit himself a shade better in conduct than his contemporaries. But the assassin's dagger cut short his career at its turning point; or history, if it would but paint truly, must have coloured him in a different shade. Henry commenced the Louvre, now the finest gallery in Europe; and his wife, Mary de Medicis, resided with her son, Louis XIII., in the apartments which he had constructed. Mary, with true Italian policy, consigned her son to the tutelage of two favourites, whose aim it was to stunt his intellect, and dwarf his mind. Louis was a singular compound of contradictory qualities; he was cunning, and cruel, and when the passion seized him, courageous. The amusement of the boy-king took a singular turn; it consisted in wheeling loads of sand, with which he constructed fortresses, and in training jackdaws to kill the small birds in the gardens of the Tuileries. He is said to have been passionately fond of music, and to have delighted in mechanical pursuits. The Queen-mother desired nothing better; it suited her ambitious views, and her love of power. It is strange how frequently the Salic law has been indirectly superseded by women in France; and, in every instance, the unfortunate prince who chanced to stand in the way, has been treated more with the view of converting him into an idiot or an imbecile, than a wise and prudent ruler. Charles IX.,

Louis XIII., and Louis XIV., are examples in point, where the Queen-mothers have studiously and systematically misdirected the minds of their children, to gratify their own selfish and ambitious aims. Louis XIV. greatly improved the Tuileries, and resided there until the palace of Versailles was completed in 1702. Up to his time the garden was separated from the palace by a street; and the ground was strangely disfigured by the grotesque remains of the preceding age. The celebrated Lenôtre was the gardener-le jardinier des rois, as he was called in the inflated language of the times,-and to his taste and decorative genius are we indebted for the beautiful walks and terraces, the orange-trees, fountains, and flowers,-the shady groves, where statuary, antique and modern, are at every step,-in short, the whole artificial scene which the eye meets at every turn, and which renders it one of the most enchanting promenades in Europe. Lenôtre was a genius in his way. He imitated his master in the dignified and grand, and was purely as artificial; he was also among the few whom Louis allowed to put off the conventional formalities in their intercourse. "I care not how soon I die !" exclaimed the "great" gardener, when he took leave of the Pope on a visit to Rome, "I have beheld the two greatest men on earth, your holiness and the King, my master." Louis bore the freedoms of Lenôtre with good humour, and to the last treated him with kindness. On one occasion, detailing to the grand monarque* the plan for the formation of the gardens at Versailles, Louis, struck with the taste of his gardener, exclaimed, "Lenôtre, I give you for that twenty thousand francs." When this munificence, however, was repeated for the fourth time, Lenôtre stopped the King, saying, "Sire, your majesty shall hear no more,-I should ruin you were I to go on."

There is little to record of Louis XV. in relation to the Tuileries; except that his reign of extravagance and debauchery precipitated that great event which shook Europe to its centre, and whose vibrations are still felt with painful solicitude. On the memorable 6th of October, 1789, Louis XVI. left his sumptuous abode at Versailles, never to return to it. That ill-fated prince took up his residence in the Tuileries with his queen and family, and only left it for a prison and the scaffold. The terrific scenes in the palace during that stormy period, when order, rule, and right were unceremoniously thrust aside by the rude multitude, have left a dark impression on the historic page; and however stoic and stern may be our moral sentiments, however rigid our notions of justice, we cannot but sympathise with the unhappy victims who paid the penalties of a preceding age as well as their own. We pass over the attempted escape from the palace and the return of Louis; but we cannot forget the sans-culottes' irruption into the Tuileries,-the fright of the poor queen,-the terror of Louis himself when a ruffian butcher clapped a red cap on his head, the ugly emblem of liberty, as the latter is miscalled, the massacre of the guards, and the fiendish fury of the assailants, who, when red-hot with the blood of their

Miss Pardoe, in her "Louis the Fourteenth and the Court of France," has drawn an admirable portrait of the stately king, his court, and the celebrated beauties and wits which adorned it; indeed, we have no book at the present day that presents so interesting an epitome of one of the most interesting epochs of history, or combines so much in so short a space.

victims, spared neither age, sex, nor decency in their destructive

course.

The Convention also held its preliminary sittings in the Tuileries, for the verification of their powers. It was here also that they abolished royalty, and introduced the system of absolute equality. Poor Louis and the Queen were at that time guarded in their palace by the wellremembered Hebert and Destournelles; and when the trumpets brayed out the event, the two latter rudely stared the king and queen in the face, who, although perceiving it, kept on reading the books they held in their hands without suffering their countenances to change.

Napoleon appears next on the scene. The brilliant soldier has connected his name with the Tuileries by his triumphal arch, his proclamations, and his decrees. From the apartments of that palace he gave away kingdoms, thrones, and principalities, and staggered the world with the audacity of his deeds; and his son, too, the young king of Rome, whose birth was announced to Europe by a whole park of artillery, is still numbered among the celebrities of the Tuileries, from the startling contrast between the commencement and the close of his somewhat melancholy career.

When the military meteor had shot down the horizon, and the glare of his success and disasters had died away, peace and tranquillity was once more restored to the Tuileries. But for a short time, as the minds of men seldom recede. Louis XVIII. wished to forget the past, as though it could be erased from the memory while so many monuments around him attested its existence. The interior of the palace, during his brief reign, presented a singular contrast to his predecessor's time: in lieu of booted marshals and belted generals, there were antiquated dowagers, sleek priests, stately ladies, and polite but prejudiced gentlemen. These friends of the restored monarch wished to roll back the tide of time, but they made a grievous mistake.

There was little change during the time of his successor, Charles X., until the termination of his political career, when the throne was shattered and the dynasty of the Bourbons virtually destroyed. It was a painful and a pitiable sight to see the old monarch driven out to exile, after buffeting the waves of public opinion so bravely; and had he not listened to his priestly advisers and lent himself to their bigot apprehensions, he might, in all probability, have obtained repose in his native land. We should then, also, have been spared the hybrid reign of his successor and, in some measure, his supplanter. Of all the changes which the Tuileries has yet experienced, certainly its present is by far the most remarkable, but it is perfectly in unison with the nature of things at the present moment. Everything is turned topsy-turvy in France for a time; how long it will endure is a subject of speculation in which almost every thinking mind is indulging, and in which no one can safely and satisfactorily succeed. Revolutions must have their round; and when this disturbing influence is keenly felt by the community who indulge in them, when their industry is shattered, their prosperity paralysed, and their peace perpetually disturbed, they will be glad to return to the common-sense ways of the world, which is seldom deviated from by the mass of the people but at a great loss and a severe sacrifice.