The bulletins of the Convention announce, that the whole republic is in a sort of revolutionary transport at the escape of Robespierre and his colleague, Collot d’Herbois, from assassination; and that we may not suppose the legislators at large deficient in sensibility, we learn also that they not only shed their grateful tears on this affecting occasion, but have settled a pension on the man who was instrumental in rescuing the benign Collot.

The members of the Committee are not, however, the exclusive objects of public adoration—­the whole Convention are at times incensed in a style truly oriental; and if this be sometimes done with more zeal than judgment, it does not appear to be less acceptable on that account.  A petition from an incarcerated poet assimilates the mountain of the Jacobins to that of Parnassus—­a state-creditor importunes for a small payment from the Gods of Olympus—­and congratulations on the abolition of Christianity are offered to the legislators of Mount Sinai!  Every instance of baseness calls forth an eulogium on their magnanimity.  A score of orators harangue them daily on their courage, while they are over-awed by despots as mean as themselves and whom they continue to reinstal at the stated period with clamorous approbation.  They proscribe, devastate, burn, and massacre—­and permit themselves to be addressed by the title of “Fathers of their Country!”

All this would be inexplicable, if we did not contemplate in the French a nation where every faculty is absorbed by a terror which involves a thousand contradictions.  The rich now seek protection by becoming members of clubs,* and are happy if, after various mortifications, they are finally admitted by the mob who compose them; while families, that heretofore piqued themselves on a voluminous and illustrious genealogy,** eagerly endeavour to prove they have no claim to either.

* Le diplome de Jacobin etait une espece d’amulette, dont les inities etaient jaloux, et qui frappoit de prestiges ceux qui ne l’etaient pas—­“The Jacobin diploma was a kind of amulet, which the initiated were jealous of preserving, and which struck as it were with witchcraft, those who were not of the number.”

     Rapport de Courtois sur les Papiers de Robespierre.

** Besides those who, being really noble, were anxious to procure certificates of sans-cullotism, many who had assumed such honours without pretensions now relinquished them, except indeed some few, whose vanity even surmounted their fears.  But an express law included all these seceders in the general proscription; alledging, with a candour not usual, that those who assumed rank were, in fact, more criminal than such as were guilty of being born to it.

—­Places and employments, which are in most countries the objects of intrigue