In the Senate-house again, the attitude of the Right Side is that of calm unbelief.  Let an august National Assembly make a Fourth-of-August Abolition of Feudality; declare the Clergy State-servants who shall have wages; vote Suspensive Vetos, new Law-Courts; vote or decree what contested thing it will; have it responded to from the four corners of France, nay get King’s Sanction, and what other Acceptance were conceivable,—­the Right Side, as we find, persists, with imperturbablest tenacity, in considering, and ever and anon shews that it still considers, all these so-called Decrees as mere temporary whims, which indeed stand on paper, but in practice and fact are not, and cannot be.  Figure the brass head of an Abbe Maury flooding forth Jesuitic eloquence in this strain; dusky d’Espremenil, Barrel Mirabeau (probably in liquor), and enough of others, cheering him from the Right; and, for example, with what visage a seagreen Robespierre eyes him from the Left.  And how Sieyes ineffably sniffs on him, or does not deign to sniff; and how the Galleries groan in spirit, or bark rabid on him:  so that to escape the Lanterne, on stepping forth, he needs presence of mind, and a pair of pistols in his girdle!  For he is one of the toughest of men.

Here indeed becomes notable one great difference between our two kinds of civil war; between the modern lingual or Parliamentary-logical kind, and the ancient, or manual kind, in the steel battle-field;—­much to the disadvantage of the former.  In the manual kind, where you front your foe with drawn weapon, one right stroke is final; for, physically speaking, when the brains are out the man does honestly die, and trouble you no more.  But how different when it is with arguments you fight!  Here no victory yet definable can be considered as final.  Beat him down, with Parliamentary invective, till sense be fled; cut him in two, hanging one half in this dilemma-horn, the other on that; blow the brains or thinking-faculty quite out of him for the time:  it skills not; he rallies and revives on the morrow; to-morrow he repairs his golden fires!  The think that will logically extinguish him is perhaps still a desideratum in Constitutional civilisation.  For how, till a man know, in some measure, at what point he becomes logically defunct, can Parliamentary Business be carried on, and Talk cease or slake?

Doubtless it was some feeling of this difficulty; and the clear insight how little such knowledge yet existed in the French Nation, new in the Constitutional career, and how defunct Aristocrats would continue to walk for unlimited periods, as Partridge the Alamanack-maker did,—­that had sunk into the deep mind of People’s-friend Marat, an eminently practical mind; and had grown there, in that richest putrescent soil, into the most original plan of action ever submitted to a People.  Not yet has it grown; but it has germinated, it is growing; rooting itself into Tartarus, branching towards Heaven:  the second season hence,