ed in the whirlwind of change, to the mightier
minds which first conjured and hoped to control it; how the Mirabeaux, the
Lally Tollendals, the Mouniers of the Assembly, were replaced and
popularly displaced by the sophists and intriguers of the Gironde and the
Constituent; how, in the Convention and the hall of the Jacobins, the
coarser men of the whole movement--the Dantons, the Robespierres, the
Marats, the facetious as ferocious Bareres, the stupid Anacharsis
Clootzes--trampled under foot, or finished with the guillotine, the
_phraseurs_ and _meneurs_ of the Gironde, your orators of set speech,
glittering abstractions, and hair-splitting definitions; the Brissots,
Vergniauds, Condorcets, and Rolands, who could degrade, dethrone, and
condemn a king to perpetual imprisonment, but were just too dainty of
conscience to go the whole hog of murder. As history, like an old
almanack, does but repeat itself within a given cycle of years, so the
same round, cast, and change of characters and characteristics, with all
the other paraphernalia of the great drama, Reform and Revolution, as
performed in France, have been, and are in due order enacting and
exhibiting in this country. We have already seen, however, the Greys,
Hollands, and Broughams, the fathers and most eloquent apostles of Reform,
dethroned by a clique of large talkers about great principles, with a
comparatively small stock of ideas to do business on, such as Mr
appropriation Ward, the Tom Duncombes, Villierses, &c., men vastly
inferior in talents and attainments, after all, to the Gironde, of whom
they are the _imitatores servum pecus_; whilst these again "give place" on
the pressure from without of the one-idea endowed tribe of Repealers of
Unions and Corn-Laws--the practical men of the Mountain genus--the
O'Connells, Cobdens, and Brights, who, not yet so fierce as their
predecessors of the Robespierre and Clootz dynasty, are so far content
with patronising the "strap and billy roller" in factories, instead of
carting aristocrats to the guillotine, which may come hereafter, if, as
they say, appetites grow with what they feed on. For it is a fact recorded
in history, that Robespierre himself was naturally a man of mild
temperament and humane disposition, converted into a sanguinary monster,
as some wild beasts are, with the first taste of human blood. Anacharsis
Clootz, his coadjutor, the celebrated "orator of the human race," in his
day, was at least a free trade