ly laid aside these
faculties from the conviction of his ability to recover all his forces
at the moment when he should require them. His brow was contemplative,
his look composed, his mouth serious and somewhat sad; the deep
inspiration of antiquity was mingled in his physiognomy with the smiles
and the carelessness of youth. At the foot of the tribune he was loved
with familiarity; as he ascended it each man was surprised to find that
he inspired him with admiration and respect; but at the first words that
fell from the speaker's lips they felt the immense distance between the
man and the orator. He was an instrument of enthusiasm, whose value and
whose place was in his inspiration. This inspiration, heightened by the
deep musical tones of his voice, and an extraordinary power of language,
had drunk in deep draughts at the purest sources of antiquity; his
sentences had all the images and harmony of poesy, and if he had not
been the orator of a democracy he would have been its philosopher and
its poet. His genius, devoted to the people, yet forbade him to descend
to the language of the people, even to flatter them. All his passions
were noble as his words, and he adored the Revolution as a sublime
philosophy destined to ennoble the nation without immolating on its
altars other victims than prejudices and tyranny. He had doctrines, and
no hatreds; the thirst of glory, and not of ambition,--nay, power
itself, was in his eyes, too real, too vulgar a thing for him to aim at,
and he disdained it for himself, and alone sought it for his ideas.
Glory and posthumous fame were his objects alone; he mounted the tribune
to behold them, and he beheld them later from the scaffold; and he
plunged into the future, young, handsome, immortal in the annals of
France, with all his enthusiasm, and some few stains, already effaced in
his generous blood. Such was the man whom nature had given to the
Girondists as their chief. He disdained the office, although he
possessed all the qualities and the views, of a statesman; too careless
to be the leader of a party, too great to be second to any one. Such was
Vergniaud,--more illustrious than useful to his friends; he would not
lead, but immortalised, them.

We will describe this great man more in detail at the period when his
talent places him in a more conspicuous situation. "Are there
circumstances," said he "in which the natural rights of man can permit a
nation to adopt any measure against