and opened his house as the place of meeting of the deputies, who assembled to protest against the illegality of the proceedings of the Crown.  Firmly, however, attached to the principles of constitutional opposition, and shrinking, therefore, from the probable effects of a revolution, he was one of the last to abandon the hope that his infatuated sovereign would open his eyes to the gulf on the brink of which he was standing, and by a timely revocation of the ordonnances, prevent the necessity of the extreme measure of an appeal to arms, and a consequent change of dynasty.  When these became inevitable, M. Perier attached himself firmly to the work of consolidating the new throne of Louis Philippe, and reassembling those elements of order and stability which the convulsion of July had scattered, but not annihilated.  On the dissolution of the ministry of M. Lafitte, M. Casimir Perier was called to the head of the government, and immediately entered into the system of conservative policy, which he continued until the close of his career.  The last time he took any important part in the debates of the Chamber of Deputies was on the 20th of March, when he made an ingenious defence of the conduct of government with respect to the events of Grenoble.  His last appearance in the Chamber was on the 29th of March, when he merely brought in several private bills.  On the 3rd of April he was attacked by the cholera, and, although the indefatigable care bestowed on him by his medical attendants had more than once apparently eradicated the disease, his frame, enfeebled by a long standing internal complaint, as well as by his intense and incessant application, was unable to resist the violence of the disease, and, after several relapses, he at length sunk under his sufferings, on the morning of the 16th of May, 1832.

As an orator M. Perier was energetic and impassioned:  the natural warmth of his temper, added to the irritability produced by illness, frequently imparted a brusque acerbity to his style, which injured both the oratorical and moral effect of his eloquence; but his reasoning was forcible, and his manner commanding and effective.  “It is not our province,” says the editor of the Journal, whence these particulars have been chiefly obtained, “to examine the merits or demerits of his political system:  recorders of, not actors in, the great political struggle in which France is engaged, we have too often had occasion to quote the enthusiastic eulogiums and unmeasured invectives heaped upon him by different parties, to render it necessary to repeat here, that he possessed the strongest proofs against the reproach of mediocrity ever being applicable to him.”

W.G.C.

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