EXERCISES IN TRANSLATION AND SUBJECTS FOR COMPOSITION

{a) Traduire en français : —

Thus was consummated the English Revolution. When we compare it with those revolutions which have during the last sixty years overthrown so many ancient governments, we cannot hut he struck by its peculiar character. "Why that character was so peculiar is suflEiciently obvious, and yet seems not to have been always understood either by eulogists or by censors. The continental revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took place in countries where all trace of the limited monarchy of the middle ages had long been effaced. The right of the prince to make laws and to levy money had, during many generations, been undisputed. His throne was guarded by a great regular army. His administration could not, without extreme peril, be blamed even in the mildest terms. His subjects held their personal liberty by no other tenure than his pleasure. Not a single institution was left which had, within the memory of the oldest man, afforded efficient protection to the subject against the utmost excess of tyranny. Those great councils which had once curbed the regal power had sunk into oblivion. Their composition and their privileges were known only to antiquaries.

We cannot wonder, therefore, that, when men who had been thus ruled succeeded in Arresting supreme power from a government which they had long in secret hated, they should have been impatient to demolish and unable to construct, that they should have been fascinated by every specious novelty, that they should have proscribed every title, ceremony, and phrase associated with the old system, and that, turning away with disgust from their own national precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles of government in the ■writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungraceful affectation, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion should speedily have engendered despotism sterner than that from which it had sprung.

(macaulay.)

(h) ' Les Français sont-ils faits pour être libres 1 ' Résumer brièvement ce que dit Mme. de Staël pour répondre à cette question.

(a) Traduire en français : —