Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity. Never was the chief of a party, sect or government, even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignificant rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and so dull.--On the eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was a question of life or death, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written and re-written, polished and re-polished,[3192] overloaded with studied ornaments and bits for effect,[3193] coated by dint of time and labor, with the academic varnish, the glitter of symmetrical antitheses, rounded periods, exclamations, omissions, apostrophes and other tricks of the pen.[3194]--In the most famous and important of his reports,[3195] I have counted eighty-four instances of personifications[3196] imitated from Rousseau and the antique, many of them largely expanded, some addressed to the dead, to Brutus, to young Barra, and others to absentees, priests, and aristocrats, to the unfortunate, to French women, and finally to abstract substantives like Liberty and Friendship. With unshaken conviction and intense satisfaction, he deems himself an orator because he harps on the same old tune. There is not one true tone in his elaborate eloquence, nothing but recipes and only those of a worn-out art, Greek and Roman common-places, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like "the flambeaux of discord," and "the vessel of State,"[3197]s coupled together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college bench;[3198]times a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in public;[3199] centimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart;[31100] in short, Marmontel's method in "Belisarius," or that of Thomas in his "Eloges," all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, powerful voice. All is a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegance of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine.--The contrast is too great between his talent and the part he plays. With such a talent, as mediocre and false as his intellect, there is no employment for which he is less suited than that of governing men; he was cut out for another, which, in a peaceable community, he would have been able to do. Suppress the Revolution, and Marat would have probably ended his days in an asylum. Danton might possibly have become a legal filibuster, a highwayman or gangster, and finally throttled or hung. Robespierre, on the contrary, might have continued as he began,[31101] a busy, hard-working lawyer of good standing, member of the Arras Academy, winner of competitive prizes, author of literary eulogies, moral essays and philanthropic