e; raised, as we said, some time ago. It is an Army
with portable guillotine: commanded by Playwright Ronsin in terrible
moustachioes; and even by some uncertain shadow of Usher Maillard, the
old Bastille Hero, Leader of the Menads, September Man in Grey! Clerk
Vincent of the War-Office, one of Pache's old Clerks, 'with a head
heated by the ancient orators,' had a main hand in the appointments, at
least in the staff-appointments.

But of the marchings and retreatings of these Six Thousand no Xenophon
exists. Nothing, but an inarticulate hum, of cursing and sooty frenzy,
surviving dubious in the memory of ages! They scour the country round
Paris; seeking Prisoners; raising Requisitions; seeing that Edicts
are executed, that the Farmers have thrashed sufficiently; lowering
Church-bells or metallic Virgins. Detachments shoot forth dim, towards
remote parts of France; nay new Provincial Revolutionary Armies rise
dim, here and there, as Carrier's Company of Marat, as Tallien's
Bourdeaux Troop; like sympathetic clouds in an atmosphere all electric.
Ronsin, they say, admitted, in candid moments, that his troops were
the elixir of the Rascality of the Earth. One sees them drawn up in
market-places; travel-plashed, rough-bearded, in carmagnole complete:
the first exploit is to prostrate what Royal or Ecclesiastical monument,
crucifix or the like, there may be; to plant a cannon at the steeple,
fetch down the bell without climbing for it, bell and belfry together.
This, however, it is said, depends somewhat on the size of the town:
if the town contains much population, and these perhaps of a dubious
choleric aspect, the Revolutionary Army will do its work gently, by
ladder and wrench; nay perhaps will take its billet without work at all;
and, refreshing itself with a little liquor and sleep, pass on to the
next stage. (Deux Amis, xii. 62-5.) Pipe in cheek, sabre on thigh; in
carmagnole complete!

Such things have been; and may again be. Charles Second sent out his
Highland Host over the Western Scotch Whigs; Jamaica Planters got
Dogs from the Spanish Main to hunt their Maroons with: France too is
bescoured with a Devil's Pack, the baying of which, at this distance of
half a century, still sounds in the mind's ear.

Chapter 3.5.V.

Like a Thunder-Cloud.

But the grand, and indeed substantially primary and generic aspect of
the Consummation of Terror remains still to be looked at; nay blinkard
History has for most part al