to drag himself into a drain, in which he was
afterwards discovered and brought out to execution. The younger
Robespierre threw himself from the window, but had not the good fortune
to perish on the spot. It seemed as if even the melancholy fate of
suicide, the last refuge of guilt and despair, was denied to men who had
so long refused every species of mercy to their fellow-creatures. Le Bas
alone had calmness enough to despatch himself with a pistol shot. Saint
Just, after imploring his comrades to kill him, attempted his own life
with an irresolute hand, and failed. Couthon lay beneath the table
brandishing a knife, with which he repeatedly wounded his bosom, without
daring to add force enough to reach his heart. Their chief, Robespierre,
in an unsuccessful attempt to shoot himself, had only inflicted a
horrible fracture on his under-jaw.

In this situation they were found like wolves in their lair, foul with
blood, mutilated, despairing, and yet not able to die. Robespierre lay
on a table in an anti-room, his head supported by a deal box, and his
hideous countenance half hidden by a bloody and dirty cloth bound round
the shattered chin.

The captives were carried in triumph to the convention, who, without
admitting them to the bar, ordered them, as outlaws, for instant
execution. As the fatal cars passed to the guillotine, those who filled
them, but especially Robespierre, were overwhelmed with execrations from
the friends and relatives of victims whom he had sent on the same
melancholy road. The nature of his previous wound, from which the cloth
had never been removed till the executioner tore it off, added to the
torture of the sufferer. The shattered jaw dropped, and the wretch
yelled aloud to the horror of the spectators. A masque taken from that
dreadful head was long exhibited in different nations of Europe, and
appalled the spectator by its ugliness, and the mixture of fiendish
expression with that of bodily agony.

Thus fell Maximilian Robespierre, after having been the first person in
the French republic for nearly two years, during which time he governed
it upon the principles of Nero or Caligula. His elevation to the
situation which he held, involved more contradictions than perhaps
attach to any similar event in history. A low-born and low-minded tyrant
was permitted to rule with the rod of the most frightful despotism a
people, whose anxiety for liberty had shortly before rendered them
unable to endur