Robespierre was not the director of the Terror at all. He was a man singularly restricted in nature, but of powerful effect in oratory in spite of his close academic style. He was a man of complete sincerity, much too narrow in doctrine, but because he exactly expressed with more lucidity than anyone else, and with more conviction, what was the passionate creed of the time, he became for something like two years at once the idol and the symbol of the revolutionary masses. As the Terror looked like an intensive application of the Revolution men associated it with Robespierre’s name, and Robespierre, suffering from the very grave defect of vanity (common in men who reach a public position), was willing to allow the false imputation, and to enjoy the title of ruler, when he was really in the Central Council of the Republic, singularly impotent. He paid a heavy price for that falsehood. It cost him his life and--what was worse--his reputation. What we know positively of Robespierre’s action during the Terror is that he attended the Central Council less and less frequently, and that he tried, if anything, to stop the Terror. In fact it was precisely on this account, his interference with the rigour of the martial law, that his enemies brought him to the guillotine. But, by a curious irony not uncommon in history, the death of this man who was not the leader of the Terror, and who had if anything attempted to check it, and who was put to death because he attempted to check it, caused the Terror to cease. Men had so universally (and so falsely) identified him with the extremity of the republican military régime that when he passed it was impossible to continue it. In the matter of Marat what I may call “the Tussaud tradition” is sounder. The man was unbalanced to the point of lunacy, and when Madame Tussaud was called in to take the impression of his face just after death, her use of the word “fiend” though exaggerated is comprehensible. This effigy of Marat which you may see in the famous gallery and which was modelled immediately after his death--an immediate piece of historical evidence of the first value--was shown in Paris when it was completed. It is an astonishing thing to have that piece of continuity with us. But all these death masks of the Revolution are of the highest value. There is an extraordinary dignity in the full features of the Queen, looking younger than she did in the last years of her life, and a singular and awful reality in the mask of Robespierre. I know only two representations of Robespierre which really recall the man. One is this effigy exactly modelled from the face itself after these last thirty-six hours of agony, and the other is the portrait which Greuze made of him and which is now in Lord Rosebery’s collection. And of these two, of course, the death mask, though repulsive, is the more actual.