for all manner of mimetic, half-original men! Tumid
blustering, with more or less of sincerity, which need not be entirely
sincere, yet the sincerer the better, is like to go far. Shall we
say, the Revolution-element works itself rarer and rarer; so that only
lighter and lighter bodies will float in it; till at last the mere
blown-bladder is your only swimmer? Limitation of mind, then vehemence,
promptitude, audacity, shall all be available; to which add only
these two: cunning and good lungs. Good fortune must be presupposed.
Accordingly, of all classes the rising one, we observe, is now
the Attorney class: witness Bazires, Carriers, Fouquier-Tinvilles,
Bazoche-Captain Bourdons: more than enough. Such figures shall Night,
from her wonder-bearing bosom, emit; swarm after swarm. Of another
deeper and deepest swarm, not yet dawned on the astonished eye; of
pilfering Candle-snuffers, Thief-valets, disfrocked Capuchins, and
so many Heberts, Henriots, Ronsins, Rossignols, let us, as long as
possible, forbear speaking.

Thus, over France, all stirs that has what the Physiologists call
irritability in it: how much more all wherein irritability has perfected
itself into vitality; into actual vision, and force that can will! All
stirs; and if not in Paris, flocks thither. Great and greater waxes
President Danton in his Cordeliers Section; his rhetorical tropes are
all 'gigantic:' energy flashes from his black brows, menaces in his
athletic figure, rolls in the sound of his voice 'reverberating from the
domes;' this man also, like Mirabeau, has a natural eye, and begins
to see whither Constitutionalism is tending, though with a wish in it
different from Mirabeau's.

Remark, on the other hand, how General Dumouriez has quitted Normandy
and the Cherbourg Breakwater, to come--whither we may guess. It is his
second or even third trial at Paris, since this New Era began; but
now it is in right earnest, for he has quitted all else. Wiry, elastic
unwearied man; whose life was but a battle and a march! No, not a
creature of Choiseul's; "the creature of God and of my sword,"--he
fiercely answered in old days. Overfalling Corsican batteries, in
the deadly fire-hail; wriggling invincible from under his horse,
at Closterkamp of the Netherlands, though tethered with 'crushed
stirrup-iron and nineteen wounds;' tough, minatory, standing at bay, as
forlorn hope, on the skirts of Poland; intriguing, battling in cabinet
and field; roaming far ou