front, or even
rivalry; and to be marked in his tablets on such an account was a sure,
though perhaps not an immediate sentence of death. Danton was a hero,
compared with this cold, calculating, creeping miscreant; for his
passions, though exaggerated, had at least some touch of humanity, and
his brutal ferocity was supported by brutal courage. Robespierre was a
coward, who signed death-warrants with a hand that shook, though his
heart was relentless. He possessed no passions on which to charge his
crimes; they were perpetrated in cold blood, and upon mature
deliberation.

Marat, the third of this infernal triumvirate, had attracted the
attention of the lower orders, by the violence of his sentiments in the
journal which he conducted from the commencement of the revolution, upon
such principles that it took the lead in forwarding its successive
changes. His political exhortations began and ended like the howl of a
blood-hound for murder; or, if a wolf could have written a journal, the
gaunt and famished wretch could not have ravined more eagerly for
slaughter. It was blood which was Marat's constant demand, not in drops
from the breast of an individual, not in puny streams from the slaughter
of families, but blood in the profusion of an ocean. His usual
calculation of the heads which he demanded amounted to two hundred and
sixty thousand; and though he sometimes raised it as high as three
hundred thousand, it never fell beneath the smaller number. It may be
hoped, and, for the honour of human nature, we are inclined to believe,
there was a touch of insanity in this unnatural strain of ferocity; and
the wild and squalid features of the wretch appear to have intimated a
degree of alienation of mind. Marat was, like Robespierre, a coward.
Repeatedly denounced in the Assembly, he skulked instead of defending
himself, and lay concealed in some obscure garret or cellar, among his
cut-throats, until a storm appeared, when, like a bird of ill omen, his
death-screech was again heard. Such was the strange and fatal
triumvirate, in which the same degree of cannibal cruelty existed under
different aspects. Danton murdered to glut his rage; Robespierre to
avenge his injured vanity, or to remove a rival whom he envied! Marat,
from the same instinctive love of blood, which induces a wolf to
continue his ravage of the flocks long after his hunger is appeased.

These monsters ruled France for a time with the most despotic sway. The
mo