Revolutionary Tribunal has done; but vengeance has not done.  Representative Lebon, after long struggling, is handed over to the ordinary Law Courts, and by them guillotined.  Nay, at Lyons and elsewhere, resuscitated Moderatism, in its vengeance, will not wait the slow process of Law; but bursts into the Prisons, sets fire to the prisons; burns some three score imprisoned Jacobins to dire death, or chokes them ‘with the smoke of straw.’  There go vengeful truculent ‘Companies of Jesus,’ ‘Companies of the Sun;’ slaying Jacobinism wherever they meet with it; flinging it into the Rhone-stream; which, once more, bears seaward a horrid cargo. (Moniteur, du 27 Juin, du 31 Aout, 1795; Deux Amis, xiii. 121-9.) Whereupon, at Toulon, Jacobinism rises in revolt; and is like to hang the National Representatives.—­With such action and reaction, is not a poor National Convention hard bested?  It is like the settlement of winds and waters, of seas long tornado-beaten; and goes on with jumble and with jangle.  Now flung aloft, now sunk in trough of the sea, your Vessel of the Republic has need of all pilotage and more.

What Parliament that ever sat under the Moon had such a series of destinies, as this National Convention of France?  It came together to make the Constitution; and instead of that, it has had to make nothing but destruction and confusion:  to burn up Catholicisms, Aristocratisms, to worship Reason and dig Saltpetre, to fight Titanically with itself and with the whole world.  A Convention decimated by the Guillotine; above the tenth man has bowed his neck to the axe.  Which has seen Carmagnoles danced before it, and patriotic strophes sung amid Church-spoils; the wounded of the Tenth of August defile in handbarrows; and, in the Pandemonial Midnight, Egalite’s dames in tricolor drink lemonade, and spectrum of Sieyes mount, saying, Death sans phrase.  A Convention which has effervesced, and which has congealed; which has been red with rage, and also pale with rage:  sitting with pistols in its pocket, drawing sword (in a moment of effervescence):  now storming to the four winds, through a Danton-voice, Awake, O France, and smite the tyrants; now frozen mute under its Robespierre, and answering his dirge-voice by a dubious gasp.  Assassinated, decimated; stabbed at, shot at, in baths, on streets and staircases; which has been the nucleus of Chaos.  Has it not heard the chimes at midnight?  It has deliberated, beset by a Hundred thousand armed men with artillery-furnaces and provision-carts.  It has been betocsined, bestormed; over-flooded by black deluges of Sansculottism; and has heard the shrill cry, Bread and Soap.  For, as we say, its the nucleus of Chaos; it sat as the centre of Sansculottism; and had spread its pavilion on the waste Deep, where is neither path nor landmark, neither bottom nor shore.  In intrinsic valour, ingenuity, fidelity, and general force and manhood, it has perhaps not far surpassed the average of Parliaments:  but in frankness of purpose, in singularity of position, it seeks its fellow.  One other Sansculottic submersion, or at most two, and this wearied vessel of a Convention reaches land.