In looking through some old papers, the present writer one day unearthed a contemporary account of the Coronation of William IV in 1831, and in it occurred the following rather striking passage:—

Talleyrand, at this time nearly eighty years of age,, was French Ambassador in London. No name, save that of Napoleon, had for a generation been more familiar to the ‘man in the street’ than his. None could excite a more vivid and perhaps fearful interest. His. ability was held to be almost diabolical. His alleged wickedness had become a legend. To the religious-minded he seemed like Voltaire risen from the grave.. That enigmatic figure stood for perhaps the most important personage in Europe, the Intellect behind the successive Governments of France; it stood for vast wealth said to be unscrupulously made; for the boundless ambition of one who had pulled the strings of inter-national diplomacy for a generation; for a man who had made and unmade Kings. Talleyrand was. esteemed an aristocrat who had been false to his order,, an apostate and excommunicate priest who had been the founder of a great schism and the despoiler of the Church, a Bishop whose Chapter had pronounced him deserving of infamy in this world and damnation in the next, a notorious and licentious profligate, an habitual gambler for colossal stakes, a treacherous.