perverted to do it, cries another!  Who will paint the huge whirlpool wherein France, all shivered into wild incoherence, whirls?  The jarring that went on under every French roof, in every French heart; the diseased things that were spoken, done, the sum-total whereof is the French Revolution, tongue of man cannot tell.  Nor the laws of action that work unseen in the depths of that huge blind Incoherence!  With amazement, not with measurement, men look on the Immeasurable; not knowing its laws; seeing, with all different degrees of knowledge, what new phases, and results of event, its laws bring forth.  France is as a monstrous Galvanic Mass, wherein all sorts of far stranger than chemical galvanic or electric forces and substances are at work; electrifying one another, positive and negative; filling with electricity your Leyden-jars,—­Twenty-five millions in number!  As the jars get full, there will, from time to time, be, on slight hint, an explosion.

Chapter 2.3.III.

Sword in Hand.

On such wonderful basis, however, has Law, Royalty, Authority, and whatever yet exists of visible Order, to maintain itself, while it can.  Here, as in that Commixture of the Four Elements did the Anarch Old, has an august Assembly spread its pavilion; curtained by the dark infinite of discords; founded on the wavering bottomless of the Abyss; and keeps continual hubbub.  Time is around it, and Eternity, and the Inane; and it does what it can, what is given it to do.

Glancing reluctantly in, once more, we discern little that is edifying:  a Constitutional Theory of Defective Verbs struggling forward, with perseverance, amid endless interruptions:  Mirabeau, from his tribune, with the weight of his name and genius, awing down much Jacobin violence; which in return vents itself the louder over in its Jacobins Hall, and even reads him sharp lectures there. (Camille’s Journal (in Hist.  Parl. ix. 366-85).) This man’s path is mysterious, questionable; difficult, and he walks without companion in it.  Pure Patriotism does not now count him among her chosen; pure Royalism abhors him:  yet his weight with the world is overwhelming.  Let him travel on, companionless, unwavering, whither he is bound,—­while it is yet day with him, and the night has not come.

But the chosen band of pure Patriot brothers is small; counting only some Thirty, seated now on the extreme tip of the Left, separate from the world.  A virtuous Petion; an incorruptible Robespierre, most consistent, incorruptible of thin acrid men; Triumvirs Barnave, Duport, Lameth, great in speech, thought, action, each according to his kind; a lean old Goupil de Prefeln:  on these and what will follow them has pure Patriotism to depend.