e portrait. I take down the first
picture of Saint-Just that comes to my hand, M. Taine is the artist:--

"Among these energetic nullities we see gradually rising _a young
monster_--with face handsome and tranquil--Saint-Just! A sort of
precocious Sulla, who at five-and-twenty suddenly springs from
the ranks, and _by force of atrocity wins his place!_ Six years
before, he began life by an act of domestic robbery: while on a
visit at his mother's, he ran away in the night with her plate and
jewels; for that he was locked up for six months. On his release,
he employed his leisure in the composition of an odious poem. Then
he flung himself head foremost into the revolution. Blood calcined
by study, a colossal pride, a conscience completely unhinged,
an imagination haunted by the bloody recollections of Rome and
Sparta, an intelligence falsified and twisted until it found
itself most at its ease in the practice of enormous paradox,
barefaced sophism, and murderous lying--all these perilous
ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated ambition, boiled
and fermented long and silently in his breast."

It is, no doubt, hard to know ourselves. One may entertain demons
unawares, and have calcined blood without being a bit the wiser.
Still, I do not find the likeness striking. It would have done just as
well to call me Nero, Torquemada, Iago, or Bluebeard.

Whether the present writer does or does not deserve all the
compliments that history has paid to Saint-Just, is a very slight
and trivial question, with which the public will naturally not much
concern itself. But as some use is from time to time made of the
writer's imputed delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it is
perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to give a better account
of things. It is true that he has written on revolutionists like
Robespierre, and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and Voltaire. It
is true that he believes the two latter to have been on the whole,
when all deductions are made, on the side of human progress. But what
sort of foundation in this for the inference that he "finds his models
in the heroes of the French Revolution," and "looks for his methods
in the Reign of Terror"? It would be equally logical to infer that
because I have written, not without sympathy and appreciation, of
Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model in a hero of the Catholic
Reaction, an