is the product of Guillotin’s endeavours, gained not without meditation and reading; which product popular gratitude or levity christens by a feminine derivative name, as if it were his daughter:  La Guillotine!  “With my machine, Messieurs, I whisk off your head (vous fais sauter la tete) in a twinkling, and you have no pain;”—­whereat they all laugh. (Moniteur Newspaper, of December 1st, 1789 (in Histoire Parlementaire).) Unfortunate Doctor!  For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall near nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like to outlive Caesar’s.

See Bailly, likewise of Paris, time-honoured Historian of Astronomy Ancient and Modern.  Poor Bailly, how thy serenely beautiful Philosophising, with its soft moonshiny clearness and thinness, ends in foul thick confusion—­of Presidency, Mayorship, diplomatic Officiality, rabid Triviality, and the throat of everlasting Darkness!  Far was it to descend from the heavenly Galaxy to the Drapeau Rouge:  beside that fatal dung-heap, on that last hell-day, thou must ‘tremble,’ though only with cold, ‘de froid.’  Speculation is not practice:  to be weak is not so miserable; but to be weaker than our task.  Wo the day when they mounted thee, a peaceable pedestrian, on that wild Hippogriff of a Democracy; which, spurning the firm earth, nay lashing at the very stars, no yet known Astolpho could have ridden!

In the Commons Deputies there are Merchants, Artists, Men of Letters; three hundred and seventy-four Lawyers; (Bouille, Memoires sur la Revolution Francaise (London, 1797), i. 68.) and at least one Clergyman:  the Abbe Sieyes.  Him also Paris sends, among its twenty.  Behold him, the light thin man; cold, but elastic, wiry; instinct with the pride of Logic; passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit.  If indeed that can be called a passion, which, in its independent concentrated greatness, seems to have soared into transcendentalism; and to sit there with a kind of godlike indifference, and look down on passion!  He is the man, and wisdom shall die with him.  This is the Sieyes who shall be System-builder, Constitution-builder General; and build Constitutions (as many as wanted) skyhigh,—­which shall all unfortunately fall before he get the scaffolding away.  “La Politique,” said he to Dumont, “Polity is a science I think I have completed (achevee).” (Dumont, Souvenirs sur Mirabeau, p. 64.) What things, O Sieyes, with thy clear assiduous eyes, art thou to see!  But were it not curious to know how Sieyes, now in these days (for he is said to be still alive) (A.D. 1834.) looks out on all that Constitution masonry, through the rheumy soberness of extreme age?  Might we hope, still with the old irrefragable transcendentalism?  The victorious cause pleased the gods, the vanquished one pleased Sieyes (victa Catoni).