h firm
and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes,
the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is
not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that
he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for
the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain
of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of
virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longer
undo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
by envy: it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium
that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'

* * * * *

In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy of
Thermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and the
death of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committees
underwent a change. He, who had hitherto been on the side of government,
became in turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the interest of
ultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and the
old is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic
with the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far the
ascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means of
judging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately
aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is
always the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere
arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of
a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two
ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one,
it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he
desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre
of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for
instance, is not that he so