NEWS - OF THE WEEK.
MJULES GREVY died on Wednesday, the 9th inst., • aged, according to the best accounts, eighty-four, 'but according to his own account, only seventy-eight. Although he had been President of the French Republic for ,eight years, and been twice elected, his departure leaves no gap in politics, and will be regretted chiefly by his own family,. whom, however, he leaves rich. He was a consistent Liberal of the English Old Radical type, with all its feeling for legal equality, its respect for law, and its acrid distrust of persons who claimed privilege, especially social privilege. He was strictly honest, he was popular with the peasantry, and he was successful in his administration ; but he had no ray of genius, no gift of eloquence, and no power of concealing a sordid kind of selfishness. He made few friends, if any ; lived a poor kind of private life, occupied chiefly with shooting and billiards ; and was so devoted to small domesti- cities, that when in 1887 his son-in-law, M. Wilson, was con- victed by opinion of jobbing in decorations and contracts, he refused to part from him, alleging, it is asserted, tbat he could not live without his grandchildren. He was an able man of the third class, and will have his niche in history as the only typical bourgeois who ever reigned in- France. Even her Ministers have usually been of another type, Colbert, for example, having an eager and peremptory initiative. M. Neckar was rather like M. Grevy, but the great Swiss wished to make the fortune of the State, and M. Gravy to make his own. He looked for it, however, and found it, in parsimony, not theft.
