was the people himself.  His newspapers cried in the public streets, and their sarcasm, bandied from mouth to mouth, has not been swept away with the other impurities of the day.  He remains, and will remain, a Menippus, the satirist stained with blood.  It was the popular chorus which led the people to their most important movements, and which was frequently stifled by the whistling of the cord of the street lamp, or in the hatchet-stroke of the guillotine.  Camille Desmoulins was the remorseless offspring of the Revolution,—­Marat was its fury; he had the clumsy tumblings of the brute in his thought, and its gnashing of teeth in his style.  His journal (L’Ami du Peuple), the People’s Friend, smelt of blood in every line.

VIII.

Marat was born in Switzerland.  A writer without talent, a savant without reputation, with a desire for fame without having received from society or nature the means of acquiring either, he revenged himself on all that was great not only in society but in nature.  Genius was as hateful to him as aristocracy.  Wherever he saw any thing elevated or striking he hunted it down as though it were a deadly enemy.  He would have levelled creation.  Equality was his mania, because superiority was his martyrdom; he loved the Revolution because it brought down all to his level; he loved it even to blood, because blood washed out the stain of his long-during obscurity; he made himself a public denouncer by the popular title; he knew that denouncement is flattery to all who tremble, and the people are always trembling.  A real prophet of demagogueism, inspired by insanity, he gave his nightly dreams to daily conspiracies.  The Seid of the people, he interested it by his self-devotion to its interests.  He affected mystery like all oracles.  He lived in obscurity, and only went out at night; he only communicated with his fellows with the most sinistrous precautions.  A subterranean cell was his residence, and there he took refuge safe from poignard and poison.  His journal affected the imagination like something supernatural.  Marat was wrapped in real fanaticism.  The confidence reposed in him nearly amounted to worship.  The fumes of the blood he incessantly demanded had mounted to his brain.  He was the delirium of the Revolution, himself a living delirium!

IX.

Brissot, as yet obscure, wrote Le Patriote Francais.  A politician, and aspiring to leading parts, he only excited revolutionary passions in proportion as he hoped one day to govern by them.  At first a constitutionalist and friend of Necker and Mirabeau, a hireling before he became a doctrinaire, he saw in the people only a sovereign more suitable to his own ambition.  The republic was his rising sun; he approached it as to his own fortune, but with prudence, and frequently looking behind him to see if opinion followed his traces.