ething out of his colorless tirades, and we grasp nothing.[3191] When
we, in astonishment, ask ourselves what all this talk amounts to, and
why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he
talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectarian preaching to
his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying,
the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening. So
much the better if the container is empty; the emptier it is the easier
and faster the crank turns. And better still, if the empty term he
selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous words justice,
humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a text from the
gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burning of heretics.--Through
this extreme perversity, the cuistre spoils his own mental instrument;
thenceforth he employs it as he likes, as his passions dictate,
believing that he serves truth in serving these.

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
rhetori