carefully studied his private life, and have learnt what he endured, and dared to do in overcoming the enemies Of his system, can hardly doubt his courage.  Calumny or error has thrown an unmerited disgrace over his last wretched days.  He has been supposed to have wounded himself in an impotent attempt to put an end to his life.  It has been ascertained that such was not the fact, the pistol by which he was wounded having been fired by one of the soldiers by whom he was arrested.  He is stated also to have wanted that firmness in death which so many of his victims displayed.  They triumphed even in their death.  Louis and Vergniaud, Marie Antoinette, and Madame Roland, felt that they were stepping from life into glory, and their step was light and elastic.  Robespierre was sinking from existence into infamy.  During those fearful hours, in which nothing in life was left him but to suffer, how wretched must have been the reminiscences of his career!  He, who had so constantly pursued one idea, must then have felt that that idea had been an error; that he had all in all been wrong; that he had waded through the blood of his countrymen to reach a goal, which, bright and luminous as it had appeared, he now found to be an ignis fatuus.  Nothing was then left to him.  His life had been a failure, and for the future he had no hope.  His body was wounded and in tortures; his spirit was dismayed by the insults of those around him, and his soul had owned no haven to which death would give it an escape.  Could his eye have been lit with animation as he ascended the scaffold!  Could his foot have then stepped with confidence!  Could he have gloried in his death!  Poor mutilated worm, agonised in body and in soul.  Can it be ascribed to want of courage in him, that his last moments were passed in silent agony and despair?

Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country:  these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; history confesses it, and to what favoured hero does history assign a fairer catalogue?  Whose name does a brighter galaxy adorn?  With such qualities, such attributes, why was he not the Washington of France?  Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a bye-word, a reproach, and an enormity?  Because he wanted faith!  He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed.  He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed.  He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness.  He was gifted with a power over common temptation, which belongs to but few.  His blood was cool and temperate, and yet his heart was open to all the softer emotions.  He had no appetite for luxury; no desire