king? For a king or a leader they, as all bodies of men, must have. He
with the thick locks, will it be? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and
rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness,
small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,--and burning fire of genius? It is
Gabriel Honoré Riquetti de Mirabeau; man-ruling deputy of Aix! Yes, that
is the Type-Frenchman of this epoch; as Voltaire was of the last. He is
French in his aspirations, acquisitions, in his virtues and vices. Mark
him well. The National Assembly were all different without that one;
nay, he might say with old Despot,--The National Assembly? I am that.

"Now, if Mirabeau is the greatest of these six hundred, who may be the
meanest? Shall we say that anxious, slight, ineffectual-looking man,
under thirty, in spectacles, his eyes troubled, careful; with upturned
face, snuffing dimly the uncertain future time; complexion of a
multiplex atrabilious color, the final shade of which may be pale
sea-green? That greenish-colored individual is an advocate of Arras; his
name is Maximilien Robespierre.

"Between which extremes of grandest and meanest, so many grand and mean,
roll on towards their several destinies in that procession. There is
experienced Mounier, whose presidential parliamentary experience the
stream of things shall soon leave stranded. A Pétion has left his gown
and briefs at Chartres for a stormier sort of pleading. A
Protestant-clerical St. Etienne, a slender young eloquent and vehement
Barnave, will help to regenerate France,

"And then there is worthy Doctor Guillotin, Bailly likewise,
time-honored historian of astronomy, and the Abbé Sieyès, cold, but
elastic, wiry, instinct with the pride of logic, passionless, or with
but one passion, that of self-conceit. This is the Sieyès who shall be