e the rule of a humane and lawful sovereign. A dastardly
coward arose to the command of one of the bravest nations in the world;
and it was under the auspices of a man who dared scarce fire a pistol,
that the greatest generals in France began their careers of conquest. He
had neither eloquence nor imagination; but substituted in their stead a
miserable, affected, bombastic style, which, until other circumstances
gave him consequence, drew on him general ridicule. Yet against so poor
an orator, all the eloquence of the philosophical Girondists, all the
terrible powers of his associate Danton, employed in a popular
assembly, could not enable them to make an effectual resistance. It may
seem trifling to mention, that in a nation where a good deal of
prepossession is excited by amiable manners and beauty of external
appearance, the person who ascended to the highest power was not only
ill-looking, but singularly mean in person, awkward and constrained in
his address, ignorant how to set about pleasing even when he most
desired to give pleasure, and as tiresome nearly as he was odious and
heartless.

To compensate all these deficiencies, Robespierre had but an insatiable
ambition, founded on a vanity which made him think himself capable of
filling the highest situation; and therefore gave him daring, when to
dare is frequently to achieve. He mixed a false and overstrained, but
rather fluent species of bombastic composition, with the grossest
flattery to the lowest classes of the people; in consideration of which,
they could not but receive as genuine the praises which he always
bestowed on himself. His prudent resolution to be satisfied with
possessing the essence of power, without seeming to desire its rank and
trappings, formed another art of cajoling the multitude. His watchful
envy, his long-protracted but sure revenge, his craft, which to vulgar
minds supplies the place of wisdom, were his only means of competing
with his distinguished antagonists. And it seems to have been a merited
punishment of the extravagances and abuses of the French revolution,
that it engaged the country in a state of anarchy which permitted a
wretch such as we have described, to be for a long period master of her
destiny. Blood was his element, like that of the other terrorists and he
never fastened with so much pleasure on a new victim; as when he was at
the same time an ancient associate. In an epitaph, of which the
following couplet may serv