“His mind was great and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder.  It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion.  Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where, hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles more judiciously.  But if deranged during the course of the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circumstances, he was slow in a readjustment.  He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern.  Perhaps the strongest feature in his character was prudence, never acting until every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever obstacles opposed.  His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known; no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision.  He was, indeed, in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great man.  His temper was naturally irritable and high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a firm and habitual ascendency over it.”

In conclusion, the plain truth is that all parallels, analogies, and similitudes between the French Revolution, or any part or phase of it, and our affairs in Ireland are moonshine.  For the practical politician his problem is always individual.  For his purposes history never repeats itself.  Human nature, doubtless, has a weakness for a precedent; it is a weakness to be respected.  But there is no such thing as an essential reproduction of social and political combinations of circumstance.  To talk about Robespierre in connection with Ireland is just as idle as it was in Robespierre to harangue about Lycurgus and Brutus in Paris.  To compare the two is to place Ireland under a preposterous magnifying-glass of monstrous dimension.  Nor is disparity of scale the only difference, vital as that is.  In no one of the leading characteristics of a community in a state of ferment, save the odium that surrounds the landlords, and that not universal, does Ireland to-day really resemble the France of a hundred years ago.  Manners, ideas, beliefs, traditions, crumbling institutions, rising aspirations, the ordering of castes and classes, the rivalry of creeds, the relations with the governing power—­all constitute elements of such radical divergence as to make comparison between modern Ireland and revolutionary France for any more serious purpose than giving a conventional and familiar point to a sentence, entirely worthless.