Some one has remarked how singular it is that all the heroes of the French Revolution were _ugly_. It seems as curious to us that they were either very large or very little persons. Danton was a Titan; Mirabeau, though not so tall, was large, and carried a huge head on his shoulders; whereas Marat and Napoleon were both small men. But the French found their characteristic love of extremes gratified in all of them. Even vice and cruelty they will not admire, unless sauced by some piquant oddity, and served up in some extraordinary dish. A little, lean corporal, like Napoleon, conquering the Brobdingnagian marshals and emperors of Europe, and issuing from his nut-like fist the laws of nations; a grinning death's head, like Voltaire, frightening Christendom from its propriety, were stimulating to intoxication. But their talent was gigantic, though their persons were not; whereas, Marat's mind was as mean, and his habits as low, as his stature was small, and his looks disgustful. Here, then, was the requisite French ragout in all its putrid perfection. A scarecrow, suddenly fleshed, but with the heart omitted--his rags fluttering, and his arms vibrating, in a furious wind, with inflamed noddle, and small, keen, bloodshot eyes--became, for a season, the idol of the most refined and enlightened capital in Europe. Had we traced, as with a lover's eye, the path of some beautiful flash of lightning, passing, in its terrible loveliness, over the still landscape, and seen it omitting the church spire, which seemed proudly pointing to it as it passed--sparing the old oak, which was bending his sacrificial head before its coming--touching not the tall pine into a column of torch-like flame, but darting its arrow of wrath upon the scarecrow, in the midst of a bean-field, and, by the one glare of grandeur, revealing its "looped and ragged" similitude to a man, its aspiring beggary, and contorted weakness--it would have presented us with a fit though faint image of the beautiful avenger, the holy homicide, the daughter of Nemesis by Apollo--Charlotte Corday--smiting the miserable Marat. Shaft from heaven's inmost quiver, why wert thou spent upon such a work? Beautiful, broad-winged bird of Jove, why didst thou light on such a quarry? Why not have ranged over Europe, in search of more potent and pernicious tyrants, or, at least, have run thy beak into the dark heart of Robespierre? Why did a steel, as sharp and bright as that of Brutus, when he rose "refulgent from the stroke," pierce only a vile insect on the hem of a mantle, and not at once a mantle and a man? Such questions are vain; for not by chance, but by decree, it came about that a death from a hand by which a demi-god would have desired to die, befell a demi-man, and that now this strange birth of nature shines on us forever, in the light of Charlotte Corday's dagger and last triumphant smile.