The scholastic education of the young man who was to inherit this considerable fortune, was nearly completed during the reign of Louis XVIII., and shortly after Charles X. ascended the throne il commencait a faire sur droit, as they phrase it in the pays Latin. Neither during the reign of Louis XVIII., nor indeed now, unless in the exact and physical sciences, does Paris afford a very solid and substantial education. Though the Roman poets and historians are tolerably well studied and taught, yet little attention is paid to Greek literature. The physical and exact sciences are unquestionably admirably taught at the Polytechnique and other schools; but neither at the College of St. Barbe, nor of Henry IV., can a pupil be so well grounded in the rudiments and humanities as in our grammar and public schools. A studious, pains-taking, and docile youth, will, no doubt, learn a great deal, no matter where he has been placed in pupilage; but we have heard from a contemporary of M. Rollin, that he was not particularly distinguished either for his industry or his docility in early life. The earliest days of the reign of Charles X. saw M. Ledru Rollin an etudiant en droit in Paris. Though the schools of law had been re-established during the Consulate pretty much after the fashion in which they existed in the time of Louis the XIV., yet the application of the alumni was fitful and desultory, and perhaps there were no two classes in France, at the commencement of 1825. who were more imbued with the Voltarian philosophy and the doctrines and principles of Rousseau, than the eleves of the schools of law and medicine.

Under a king so sceptical and voluptuous, so much of a philosophie and phyrroneste, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to spread themselves through all ranks of society—to permeate from the very highest to the very lowest classes: and not all the lately acquired asceticism of the monarch, his successor, nor all the efforts of the Jesuits could restrain or control the tendencies of the etudiants en droit. What the law-students were antecedently and subsequent to 1825, we know from the Physiologie de l'Homme de Loi; and it is not to be supposed that M. Ledru Rollin, with more ample pecuniary means at command, very much differed from his fellows. After undergoing a three years' course of study, M. Rollin obtained a diploma as a licencie en droit, and commenced his career as stagiare somewhere about the end of 1826 or the beginning of 1827. Toward the close of 1829, or in the first months of 1830, he was, we believe, placed on the roll of advocates; so that he was called to the bar, or, as they say in France, received an advocate, in his twenty-second or twenty-third year.

The first years of an advocate, even in France, are generally passed in as enforced an idleness as in England. Clients come not to consult the greenhorn of the last term; nor does any avoue among our neighbors, any more than any attorney among ourselves, fancy that an old head is to be found on young shoulders. The years 1830 and 1831 were not marked by any oratorical effort of the author of the Decline of England; nor was it till 1832 that, being then one of the youngest of the bar of Paris, he prepared and signed an opinion against the placing of Paris in a state of siege consequent on the insurrections of June. Two years after he prepared a memoir; or factum, on the affair of the Rue Transonain, and defended Dupoty, accused of complicite morale, a monstrous doctrine invented by the Attorney-General Hebert. From 1834 to 1841 he appeared as counsel in nearly all the cases of emeute or conspiracy where the individuals prosecuted were Republicans, or quasi-Republicans. Meanwhile, he had become the proprietor and redacteur en chef of the Reforme newspaper, a political journal of an ultra-Liberal—indeed of a Republican—complexion, which was then called of extreme opinions, as he had previously been editor of a legal newspaper called Journal du Palais. La Reforme had been originally conducted by Godefroy Cavaignac, the brother of the general, who continued editor till the period of the fatal illness which preceded his death. The defense of Dupoty, tried and sentenced under the ministry of Thiers to five years' imprisonment, as a regicide, because a letter was found open in the letter-box of the paper of which he was editor, addressed to him by a man said to be implicated in the conspiracy of Quenisset, naturally brought M. Rollin into contact with many of the writers in La Reforme; and these persons, among others Guinard Arago, Etienne Arago, and Flocon, induced him to embark some portion of his fortune in the paper. From one step he was led on to another, and ultimately became one of the chief—indeed, if not the chief proprietor. The speculation was far from successful in a pecuniary sense, but M. Rollin, in furtherance of his opinions, continued for some years to disburse considerable sums in the support of the journal. By this he no doubt increased his popularity and his credit with the Republican party, but it cannot be denied that he very materially injured his private fortune. In the earlier portion of his career, M. Rollin was, it is known, not indisposed to seek a seat in the Chamber, under the auspices of M. Barrot, but subsequently to his connection with the Reforme, he had himself become thoroughly known to the extreme party in the departments, and on the death of Gamier Pages the elder, was elected in 1841 for Le Mans, in La Sarthe.

In addressing the electors, after his return, M. Rollin delivered a speech much more Republican than Monarchical. For this he was sentenced to four months' imprisonment, but the sentence was appealed against and annulled on a technical ground, and the honorable member was ultimately acquitted by the Cour d'Assizes of Angers.

The parliamentary debut of M. Rollin took place in 1842. His first speech was delivered on the subject of the secret-service money. The elocution was easy and flowing, the manner oratorical, the style somewhat turgid and bombastic. But in the course of the session M. Rollin improved, and his discourse on the modification of the criminal law, on other legal subjects, and on railways, were more sober specimens of style. In 1843 and 1844 M. Rollin frequently spoke; but though his speeches were a good deal talked of outside the walls of the Chamber, they produced little effect within it. Nevertheless, it was plain to every candid observer that he possessed many of the requisites of the orator—a good voice, a copious flow of words, considerable energy and enthusiasm, a sanguine temperament and jovial and generous disposition. In the sessions of 1845-46, M. Rollin took a still more prominent part. His purse, his house in the Rue Tournon, his counsels and advice, were all placed at the service of the men of the movement; and by the beginning of 1847 he seemed to be acknowledged by the extreme party as its most conspicuous and popular member. Such indeed was his position when the electoral reform banquets, on a large scale, began to take place in the autumn of 1847. These banquets, promoted and forwarded by the principal members of the opposition to serve the cause of electoral reform, were looked on by M. Rollin and his friends in another light. While Odillon Barrot, Duvergier d'Haurunne, and others, sought by means of them to produce an enlarged constituency, the member for Sarthe looked not merely to functional, but to organic reform—not merely to an enlargement of the constituency, but to a change in the form of the government. The desire of Barrot was a la verite a la sincerite des institutions conquises en Juillet 1830; whereas the desire of Rollin was, a l'amelioration des classes laborieuses; the one was willing to go on with the dynasty of Louis Philippe and the Constitution of July improved by diffusion and extension of the franchise, the other looked to a democratic and social republic. The result is now known. It is not here our purpose to go over the events of the Revolution of February 1848, but we may be permitted to observe, that the combinations by which that event was effected were ramified and extensive, and were long silently and secretly in motion.

The personal history of M. Rollin, since February 1848, is well-known and patent to all the world. He was the ame damnee of the Provisional Government—the man whose extreme opinions, intemperate circulars, and vehement patronage of persons professing the political creed of Robespierre—indisposed all moderate men to rally around the new system. It was in covering Ledru Rollin with the shield of his popularity that Lamartine lost his own, and that he ceased to be the political idol of a people of whom he must ever be regarded as one of the literary glories and illustrations. On the dissolution of the Provisional Government, Ledru Rollin constituted himself one of the leaders of the movement party. In ready powers of speech and in popularity no man stood higher; but he did not possess the power of restraining his followers or of holding them in hand, and the result was, that instead of being their leader he became their instrument. Fond of applause, ambitious of distinction, timid by nature, destitute of pluck, and of that rarer virtue moral courage, Ledru Rollin, to avoid the imputation of faint-heartedness, put himself in the foreground, but the measures of his followers being ill-taken, the plot in which he was mixed up egregiously failed, and he is now in consequence an exile in England.

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GENERAL GARIBALDI.

MR. FILIPANTE gives the following notice of this Italian revolutionary leader in a communication to the Evening Post. "His exertions in behalf of the liberal movement in Italy have been indefatigable. As active as he was courageous, he was among the first to take up arms against Austrian tyranny, and the last to lay them down. Even when the triumvirate at Rome had been overthrown, and the most ardent spirits despaired of the republic, Garibaldi and his noble band of soldiers refused to yield; they maintained a vigorous resistance to the last, and only quitted the ground when the cause was so far gone that their own success would have been of no general advantage.

"The General is about forty years of age. He was in early life an officer in the Sardinian service, but, engaging in an unsuccessful revolt against the government of Charles Albert, he was compelled to leave his native land. He fled to Montevideo, where he fought with distinction in the wars against Rosas. At the breaking out of the late revolution he returned. His military capacities being well known, he was entrusted with a command; and throughout the war his services were most efficient. He defeated the allied troops of Austria, France, and Naples, in several battles; his name, in fact, became a terror, and when the republic fell, and he was compelled to retire to the Appenines, the invaders felt that his return would be more formidable than any other event.

"From Italy he went to Morocco, where he has since lived. But his friends, desiring that his great energies should be actively employed, have offered him the command of a merchant ship, which he has accepted. He will, therefore, hereafter be engaged in the peaceful pursuits of commerce, unless his country should again require his exertions."

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CRIME, IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE.

In recent discussions of the effects of education upon morals, the relative conditions of Great Britain and France in this respect have often been referred to. The following paragraph shows that the statistics in the case have not been well understood:

"In a recent sitting of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, M. Leon Faucher, the representative, read a paper on the state of crime in England; and some of the journals have taken advantage of this to institute a comparison with returns of the criminality of France, recently published by the Government—the result being anything but flattering to England. But M. Faucher, the Academy, the newspapers, and almost everybody else in France, seems to be entirely ignorant that it is impossible to institute a comparison between the amount of crime in England and the amount of crime in France, inasmuch as crimes are not the same in both countries. Thus, for example, it is a felony in England to steal a pair of shoes, the offender is sent before the Court of Assize, and his offense counts in the official returns as a "crime;" in France, on the contrary, a petty theft is considered a delit, or simple offense, is punished by a police magistrate, and figures in the returns as an "offense." With respect to murders, too, the English have only two general names for killing—murder or manslaughter—but the French have nearly a dozen categories of killing, of which what the English call murder forms only one. It is the same, in short, with almost every species of crime."

THE END