an immortal feeling seems to have imparted immortal youth to the language; the style and the words still possess fresh vigour : Ah, freedom is a noble thing! Freedom makes man to have a liking; A noble heart may have none ease, Our French poets were then far removed from that dignity of language of which Dante had set an example in Italy, SENTIMENT OF POLITICAL LIBERTY-WHY DIFFERENT IN THE ANCIENT INSTITUTIONS OF THE POLITICAL institutions have not less influence than morals upon literature. If the sentiment of liberty displays itself less at this period amongst the writers of our country than amongst those of England, the cause is to be found in the dissimilar positions of both; having attained an unequal degree of public power by different roads, they could not have the same language. It is worth our while to pause here for a moment, in order to extract from poetry the philosophy of history, which is often found concealed under it; we shall better understand how French and English poetry have been led to speak of liberty, or to leave it unnoticed, when we recall to mind the part which each people performed in its national institutions. In what relates to England, I shall only have to transcribe a few pages of a very short but excellent work, entitled General View of the Constitution of England by an Englishman," a work far superior to what was once hastily written by the Genoese theorist Delolme, with Blackstone for his authority.* "For upwards of two hundred years after William the Conqueror, the English parliament was in its composition and its chief functions, nearly analogous to the parliament of Paris from Hugh Capet to St. Louis, with this difference, however, that the French parliament, though sometimes considered a national one, was only in reality the parliament of the duchy of France, and of a few other adjacent provinces, whereas the parliament of England was an assembly of the principal personages of the kingdom, and its authority was every where acknowledged. "The members of both parliaments, English and French, were the barons, knights, and prelates, and a certain number of lawyers, all convoked for a limited time by letters from the sovereign. Each of these parliaments formed only a single house; they were as much a supreme court * Having been baffled in our search after this work, we are reluctantly compelled to translate from the French version of the author the passages which he has extracted.-Translator. of justice as a political assembly. But whilst the members of the English parliaments were daily acquiring greater political importance, and their consultative insensibly merged into a deliberative voice, so much so that they ended by legally establishing their power to refuse every demand of their sovereigns, who might equally refuse assent to their demands, the members of the parliament of Paris were gradually deprived of their consideration, owing to the progressive increase of the kingly power instead of obtaining a deliberative voice in important national affairs, they were daily less consulted on political questions, and at length came to be considered as being principally judges of the baronial court of the duchy of France. Philip Augustus established the institution of the peerage, and rendered the peers members of the parliament of Paris, in order to augment its importance by an image of the ancient national baronage, without thereby lessening in any degree the royal influence. If, on the annexation of Normandy to the crown, he had conferred on the chief Norman barons and churchmen the right of being members of the parliament of Paris, and his successors had followed the same course in the different provinces of which they successively obtained possession, the parliament of Paris would have become a real national parliament, like that of England, and the deputies of the principal cities would eventually have found their places in it. Philip, however, like his successors, deemed it preferable to allow of the separate existence of the parliaments or estates of those provinces which he united to the crown rather than aggregate them to the government of France. The provinces were also jealous of the maintenance of their own parliaments. St. Louis once summoned to the parliament a great number of the higher nobility and prelates of the whole kingdom, with deputies from several cities; so that this parliament bore a perfect resemblance to the English parliament of the same period; but this example was neither followed up by himself nor by Philip the Bold, his successor, who endeavoured, on the contrary, by every means in his power to discourage the high nobility from attending parlia ment. "It was Philip the Fair who gave the severest blow to the authority of Parliament, by his invention of the states-general, which never existed before his reign, whatever the framers of systems may assert to the contrary. By only allowing the prelates and higher nobility to attend the |