, if we should
have committed any, from being charged to the American translator of
the work.]

Lamartine is visibly inclined in favor of the Girondists--the founders
of the Republic; but his sense of justice does not permit him to
condemn the Jacobins without vindicating their memory from that
crushing judgment which their contemporaries pronounced upon them. He
thus describes, in a few masterly strokes, the character of
Robespierre:

"Robespierre's refusal of the supreme power was sincere in the
motives which he alleged. But there were other motives which caused
him to reject the sole government. These motives he did not yet avow.
The fact is that he had arrived at the end of his thoughts, and that
himself did not know what form was best suited to revolutionary
institutions. More a man of ideas than of action, Robespierre had the
sentiment of the Revolution rather than the political formula. The
soul of the institutions of the future was in his dreams, but he
lacked the mechanism of a popular government. His theories, all taken
from books, were brilliant and vague as perspectives, and cloudy as
the far distance. He contemplated them daily; he was dazzled by them;
but he never touched them with the firm and precise hand of practice.
He forgot that Liberty herself requires the protection of a strong
power, and that this power must have a head to conceive, and hands to
execute. He believed that the words Liberty, Equality, Disinterestedness,
Devotion, Virtue, incessantly repeated, were themselves a government.
He took philosophy for politics, and became indignant at his false
calculations. He attributed continually his deceptions to the
conspiracies of aristocrats and demagogues. He thought that in
extinguishing from society the aristocrats and demagogues, he would be
able to suppress the vices of humanity, and the obstacles to the work
of liberal institutions. His notion of the people was an illusion, not
a reality. He became irritated to find the people often so weak, so
cowardly, so cruel, so ignorant, so changeable, so unworthy the rank
which nature has assigned them. He became irritated and soured, and
challenged the scaffold to extricate him from his difficulties. Then,
indignant at the excesses of the scaffold, he returned to words of
justice and humanity. Then once more he seized upon the scaffold,
invoked virtue and suscitated death. Floating sometimes on clouds,
sometimes in human gore, he despaired of manki