But that of Louis Philippe was not a stagnant or retrogressive _regime.

"La carriere_" was very undeniably open to talent and merit of every description.

Material well-being was on the increase.

And the door was not shut against any political change which even very advanced Liberalism, of the kind consistent with order, might have aspired to.
But the Liberalism which moved France was not of that kind.
One of my most charming friends of those days, Rosa Stewart, who afterwards became and was well known to literature as Madame Blaze de Bury, was both too clever and too shrewd an observer, as well as, to me at least, too frank to pretend any of the assurance which was then _de mode_.

She saw what was coming, and was fully persuaded that it must come.