spierre's aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor for
the young Dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative, but we find
great difficulty in believing that such a post could ever have been an
object of Robespierre's ambition. Now and always he showed a rather
singular preference for the substance of power over its glitter. He was
vain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite of his passion
for empty phrases, he was not without a sense of reality.

The insurrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not of
Robespierre, but of a more commanding personage, who now became one of
the foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent champion of
reaction, found a striking argument for the presence of the divine hand
in the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of the revolutionary
leaders. How could such men, he asked, have achieved such results, if
they had not been instruments of the directing will of heaven? Danton at
any rate is above this caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculean
type of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision of spiritual
things; or a Chatham, though without Chatham's august majesty of life;
or a Cromwell, though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patriotic
purpose. His visage and port seemed to declare his character: dark
overhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth;
an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as a
fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies
saw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral regenerator;
the difference between him and Robespierre is typified in Danton's
version of an old saying, that he who hates vices hates men. He was not
free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes
belongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, because
nobility implies a purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness which
were not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to the
truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the line
that separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed for
a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed a desperado by his
airs of 'immoral thoughtlessness.' But the world forgives much to a
royal size, and Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes. He had
that largeness of motive, fulness of nature, and capaciousness of mind,
whic