the gulf
of waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of
his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his
speeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it
is transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which the
critics of painting call Texture.

His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the Convent of the
Jacobins took little heed of these things; the matter was too absorbing,
the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Covenanters of
the Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's dragoons a few miles off,
exulted in the endless exhortations and expositions of their hill
preachers: they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
Mucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext. We now
find the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts of the Solemn
League and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the picturesque
and the impressive. If we cannot say the same of the great preacher of
the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time has
not yet softened the tones, and partly that there is no one in all the
world with whom it is so difficult to sympathise, as with the narrower
fanatics of our own particular faith.

We have still to mark the trait that above everything else gave to
Robespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to him,
they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And Robespierre in
one way deserved this confidence. He was eminently the possessor of a
conscience. When the strain of circumstance in the last few months of
his life pressed him towards wrong, at least before doing wrong he was
forced to lie to his own conscience. This is a kind of honesty, as the
world goes. In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre's
portrait, simply inscribing it, _The Incorruptible_. Throngs passed
before it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eager
murmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric on
the unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as the
modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it
is easier to turn the sun from its course, than to turn Fabricius from
the path of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsor
for their children. Ladies of wealth, including at least one
countrywoman of our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses,
for women