Of Marat, too, however, we are tempted to say a single word--"Marah," might he better have been called, for he was a water of bitterness. He reminds us of one of those small, narrow, inky pools we have seen in the wilderness, which seem fitted to the size of a suicide, and waiting in gloomy expectation of his advent. John Foster remarked, of some small "malignant" or other, that he had never seen so much of the "_essence_ of devil in so little a compass." Marat was a still more compact concentration of that essence. He was the prussic acid among the family of poisons. His unclean face, his tiny figure, his gibbering form, his acute but narrow soul, were all possessed by an infernal unity and clearness of purpose. On the great clock of the Revolution--while Danton struck the reverberating hours--while Robespierre crept cautiously but surely, like the minute-hand, to his object--Marat was the everlasting "tick-tick" of the smaller hand, counting, like a death-watch, the quick seconds of murder. _He_ never rested; he never slumbered, or walked through his part; he fed but to refresh himself for revolutionary action; he slept but to breathe himself for fresh displays of revolutionary fury. Milder mood, or lucid interval, there was none in him. The wild beast, when full, sleeps; but Marat was never full--the cry from the "worm that dieth not," within him being still, "Give, give," and the flame in his bosom coming from that fire which is "never to be quenched." If, as Carlyle seems sometimes to insinuate, earnestness be in itself a divine quality, then should Marat have a high place in the gallery of heroes; for if an earnest angel be admirable, chiefly for his earnestness, should not an earnest imp be admirable, too? If a tiger be respectable from his unflinching oneness of object, should not a toad, whose sole purpose is to spit sincere venom, crawl amid general consideration, too? If a conflagration of infernal fire be on the whole a useful and splendid spectacle, why not honor one of its bluest and most lurid flames, licking, with peculiar pertinacity, at some proud city "sham?" But we suspect, that over Carlyle's imagination the quality of greatness exerts more power than that of earnestness. A great regal-seeming ruffian fascinates him, while the petty scoundrel is trampled on. His soul rises to mate with the tiger in his power, but his foot kicks the toad before it, as it is lazily dragging its loathsomeness through the wet garden-beds. The devils, much admired as they stood on the burning marl, lose caste with him when, entering the palace of Pandemonium, they shrink into miniatures of their former selves. Mirabeau, with Carlyle, is a cracked angel; Marat, a lame and limping fiend.