Whether Buonaparte was ever at heart a real Jacobin even for the moment, may be greatly doubted, whatever mask his situation obliged him to wear. He himself always repelled the charge as an aspersion. His engagement in the affair of the Sections probably determined his opinions as Republican, or rather Thermidorien, at the time, as became him by whom the Republican army had been led and commanded on that day. Besides, at the head of an army zealously republican, even his power over their minds required to be strengthened, for some time at least, by an apparent correspondence in political sentiments betwixt the troops and the general. But in the practical doctrines of government which he recommended to the Italian Republics, his ideas were studiously moderate, and he expressed the strongest fear of, and aversion to, revolutionary doctrines. He recommended the granting equal rights and equal privileges to the nobles, as well as to the indignant vassals and plebeians who had risen against them. In a word, he advocated a free set of institutions, without the intermediate purgatory of a revolution. He was, therefore, at this period, far from being a Jacobin. But though Buonaparte's wishes were thus wisely moderated by practical views, he was not the less likely to be sensible that he was the object of fear, of hatred, and of course of satire and misrepresentation, to that side of the opposed parties in France which favoured royalty. Unhappily for himself, he was peculiarly accessible to every wound of this nature, and, anxiously jealous of his fame, suffered as much under the puny attacks of the journalists,[322] as a noble steer or a gallant horse does amid his rich pasture, under the persecutions of insects, which, in comparison to himself, are not only impotent, but nearly invisible. In several letters to the Directory, he exhibits feelings of this nature which would have been more gracefully concealed, and evinces an irritability against the opposition prints, which we think likely to have increased the zeal with which he came forward on the Republican side at this important crisis.[323] [Sidenote: INTRIGUES OF PICHEGRU.] Another circumstance, which, without determining Buonaparte's conduct, may have operated in increasing his good-will to the cause which he embraced, was his having obtained the clew of Pichegru's correspondence with the house of Bourbon.[324] To have concealed this, would have been but a second rate merit with the exiled family, whose first thanks must have been due to the partisan whom he protected. This was no part for Buonaparte to play; not that we have a right to say he would have accepted the chief character had it been offered to him, but his ambition could never have stooped to any inferior place in the drama. In all probability, his ideas fluctuated betwixt the example of Cromwell and of Washington--to be the actual liberator, or the absolute governor of his country.