o the Jacobin Club, to repose, as he
expressed it, his patriotic sorrows in their virtuous bosoms, where
alone he hoped to find succour and sympathy. To this partial audience he
renewed, in a tone of yet greater audacity, the complaints with which he
had loaded every branch of the government, and the representative body
itself. He reminded those around him of various heroic eras, when their
presence and their pikes had decided the votes of the trembling
deputies. He reminded them of their pristine actions of revolutionary
vigour--asked them if they had forgot the road to the convention, and
concluded by pathetically assuring them, that if they forsook him, "he
stood resigned to his fate; and they should behold with what courage he
would drink the fatal hemlock." The artist David, caught him by the hand
as he closed, exclaiming, in rapture at his elocution, "I will drink it
with thee."

The distinguished painter has been reproached, as having, on the
subsequent day, declined the pledge which he seemed so eagerly to
embrace. But there were many of his original opinion, at the time he
expressed it so boldly; and had Robespierre possessed either military
talents, or even decided courage, there was nothing to have prevented
him from placing himself that very night at the head of a desperate
insurrection of the Jacobins and their followers.

Payan, the successor of Hebert, actually proposed that the Jacobins
should instantly march against the two committees, which Robespierre
charged with being the focus of the anti-revolutionary machinations,
surprise their handful of guards, and stifle the evil with which the
state was menaced, even in the very cradle. This plan was deemed too
hazardous to be adopted, although it was one of those sudden and master
strokes of policy which Machiavel would have recommended. The fire of
the Jacobins spent itself in tumult, and threatening, and in expelling
from the bosom of their society Collot d'Herbois, Tallien, and about
thirty other deputies of the mountain party, whom they considered as
specially leagued to effect the downfall of Robespierre, and whom they
drove from their society with execration and even blows.

Collot d'Herbois, thus outraged, went straight from the meeting of the
Jacobins to the place where the committee of public safety was still
sitting, in consultation on the report which they had to make to the
convention the next day upon the speech of Robespierre. Saint Just, on