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Sir John Herschel, in a paper on Humboldt’s Kosmos, in the Edinburgh Review, January, 1848, has the following sentence, which reads strangely now, for it was given to the public just before the catastrophe which overthrew the throne of Louis-Philippe, and led in a few months to the Italian and Hungarian wars. Herschel’s words are: “A great and wondrous attempt is making in civilized Europe at the present time—neither more nor less than to stave off, ad infinitum, the tremendous visitation of war.” The retrospect has been thus sketched:

Seventeen years Louis-Philippe sat on his elective throne: great increase of wealth and physical progress were the results of his reign at home, peace preserved abroad, and foreign policy alike successful; yet the King was not popular at home. He was hated alike by the Legitimist party, in whose eyes he was but a usurper, and by the revolutionists, who sighed for entire emancipation from kingly rule. Besides, there are deep and dark stains upon the reign of the “Napoleon of Peace,” as Louis-Philippe liked to be called. His reign was a period of corruption in high places, of jealousy and illiberal restriction towards his own subjects, of a fraudulent and heartless policy towards the allies of his country, whose good will he more especially forfeited by his over-reaching conduct in regard to the marriage of the Duc de Montpensier to a Spanish princess. His downfal was long predicted by the leading journalists of England, where public opinion is unfettered by arbitrary laws. In France, too, it was understood that Louis-Philippe was, in great measure, restrained in his views by his sister, Madame Adelaide, who died Dec. 30, 1847. “Then it came to pass that the heart of the nation became alienated from their king; and when a trifling disturbance in February, 1848, was aggravated into a popular riot through the audacity of a few ultra-republicans, Louis-Philippe felt that he stood alone and unsupported as a constitutional king, both at home and abroad, and that the soldiery were his only means of defence. He shrank from employing their bayonets against his people: he fell in consequence, and his house fell with him. The King fled in disguise from Paris to the coast of Normandy, and taking ship again found a safe refuge on the shores of England, to which his family had already made their escape. He landed at Newhaven, March 3rd, 1848. The Queen of England—who, in 1843, had enjoyed the hospitality of Louis-Philippe at the Château d’Eu, his royal residence near Dieppe, and who had entertained him in the following year at Windsor, and conferred on him the order of the Garter—immediately assigned Claremont, near Esher, as a residence for himself and his exiled family. From the time of his arrival in England, his health began visibly to decline: he died on the 26th of August, 1850, in the presence of Queen Amelie and his family, having dictated to them the conclusion of his memoirs, and having received the last rites and sacraments of the church at the hands of his chaplain. He was buried on the following 2nd of September at the Roman Catholic chapel at Weybridge, Surrey, and an inscription was placed upon his coffin, stating that his ashes remain there, Donec Deo adjuvante in patriam avitos inter cineres transferantur” (Saturday Review). They have not been removed!