which alone his nature was susceptible; and that, if he had been at
liberty to make his choice, he would rather have murdered Robespierre
and Danton than Vergniaud and Gensonne. But they justly appreciated that
levity which made him incapable alike of earnest love and of earnest
hatred, and that meanness which made it necessary to him to have a
master. In truth, what the planters of Carolina and Louisiana say of
black men with flat noses and woolly hair was strictly true of Barere.
The curse of Canaan was upon him. He was born a slave. Baseness was an
instinct in him. The impulse which drove him from a party in adversity
to a party in prosperity was as irresistible as that which drives the
cuckoo and the swallow towards the sun when the dark and cold months are
approaching. The law which doomed him to be the humble attendant of
stronger spirits resembled the law which binds the pilot-fish to the
shark. "Ken ye," said a shrewd Scotch lord, who was asked his opinion of
James the First,--"ken ye a John Ape? If I have Jacko by the collar, I
can make him bite you; but, if you have Jacko, you can make him bite
me." Just such a creature was Barere. In the hands of the Girondists he
would have been eager to proscribe the Jacobins; he was just as ready,
in the gripe of the Jacobins, to proscribe the Girondists. On the
fidelity of such a man the heads of the Mountain could not, of course,
reckon; but they valued their conquest as the very easy and not very
delicate lover in Congreve's lively song valued the conquest of a
prostitute of a different kind. Barere was, like Chloe, false and
common; but he was, like Chloe, constant while possessed; and they asked
no more. They needed a service which he was perfectly competent to
perform. Destitute as he was of all the talents both of an active and of
a speculative statesman, he could with great facility draw up a report,
or make a speech on any subject and on any side. If other people would
furnish facts and thoughts, he could always furnish phrases; and this
talent was absolutely at the command of his owners for the time being.
Nor had he excited any angry passion among those to whom he had hitherto
been opposed. They felt no more hatred to him than they felt to the
horses which dragged the cannon of the Duke of Brunswick and of the
Prince of Saxe-Coburg. The horses had only done according to their kind,
and would, if they fell into the hands of the French, drag with equal
vigor and equ