The most notable feature of the political movements in Paris
is that alternate scratching and kissing of public men which is fre- quently witnessed when principles are made subservient to per- sonal aggrandizement. M. Leon Faucher is negotiating an armis- tice with Changarnier on behalf of- the President; and M. Guizot is undergoing a process of fusion into the Legitimist party. A notion lately obtained, that the various subdivisions of the three great parties in the Assembly---Monarohists, Republicans, and Bonapartists—were about to close ranks; but obstacles to such a consummation are interposed by the personal incompatibilities of Guizot and Thiers in the first-named party, of Cavaignao and Girardin in the second. The Executive Government profess to be vehemently afraid of some attempt to renew disturbances by the anarchical factions : a pretext„ some suspect, to cover the concen- tration of a military forte with a view to decide the Presidential election by a coup d'etat. The military insurrection in Portugal appears to have miscarried. Saldanha remains at Coimbra, with only 1400 men, while the King is at Santarem with 4000. To the South of the Tagus the insur- gents are said to be increasing in numbers; but Oporto has refused to make common cause with them.
The speedy return of Metternich to Vienna is expected ; and most of his old officials—some of them sickly men of seventy and eighty years of age—are to be reinstalled. At Berlin the Govern- ment is placed between two fires : the Junker party (the party of the landed aristocracy) assail it as inveterately as the Liberals. Throughout Germany, the active propagandism of the Ultramon- tane Catholics, under the patronage of Austria, is exciting great alarm and indignation among the Protestants ; and in Prussia an ecclesiastical party, closely analogous to our Tractarians, patronized by the Court, is giving much offence. It seems to be expected that a resolute opposition will be offered in the Diet, by the envoys of the minor governments, to the project understood to be enter- tained by Austria, Prussia, and the four Kings, to extend the me- diatization of 1815 to all the other German states.
