Not inconsistent with that spectacle is the other, nor less
re- markable—the old governing influences of Europe, exiled from power, or shaking in the throne and distracted in councils, are pe- titioning for an idea that may help them to exist. While the good Bishops of the Sardinian States are invoking the Sovereign Pontiff to reconsider thepolicy.which is breaking up the Romish Church, his favourite ecclesiastic in Piedmont, Cardinal Franzoni, persists so obstinately in the reactionary policy, that he draws upon himself exile and confiscation. Poor Pio Nono, confessing inability to wield the destiny of Rome, abandoning his mild me- thods of little regeneration for that " eternal" state, has wholly lent himself to the reactionary idea. The more intelligent Prelates of Piedmont, not few in proportion, recognize all the destructive tendencies of that ideas and petition against it, in vain ; and the civil state of Piedmont, in self-preservation, has been forced into open defiance of the Papal supremacy. As the Anti-Papal feeling has spread far and wide in Italy, especially North of the Neapoli- tan frontier, such a signal adhesion to that feeling by the constitu- tional state of the peninsula is a formidable event for the ancient ecclesiastical dominion. That rule cannot accommodate its essen- tial idea to the living ideas of the day, and it is to be extruded as dead matter from the living organism of society.
In like manner, the Legitimist party in France is vainly strug. gling to keep up a show of existence. The earnest Marquis de Larochejainelin only retains his connexion with his party by waiving his attempt to reconcile the idea of Legitimacy with the presence of the people. M. de Larochejaquelin explains, that he did not seek a restoration of the original Monarchy at the 'hands of the people, but only to give the people an opportunity of declaring that it did not concur in the Republic. This is permitting the people humbly to support the Pretender, without prejudice to his absolute rights over said people : such is the proposition of that statesman among the Legitimists who is most intelligently and earnestly bent on accommodating the Legitimist idea to the ideas of the day !—No, the Count de Chambord is right ; Legitimacy cannot abate itself : it must die—it is dying. No wonder, then, if tap Parisians, practical philosophers, pay far less attention to the dreamy controversies of the political Legitimists than they do to the fact of present importance, that the Italian Opera is at last organ- ized : that the Count de Chambord should reign as Henry the Fifth is an idle romance-dream, but that Mr. Lumley is appointed director of the Opera Italien is a fact for the Parisians of serious and present importance.
