yelled aloud, to the horror of the spectators.[2] A mask taken from that
dreadful head was long exhibited in different nations of Europe, and
appalled the spectator by its ugliness, and the mixture of fiendish
expression with that of bodily agony.

[2] The fate of no tyrant in history was so hideous at the
conclusion, excepting perhaps that of Jugurtha.

Thus fell Maximilian Robespierre, after having been the first person in
the French republic for nearly two years, during which time he governed
it upon the principles of Nero or Caligula. His elevation to the
situation which he held involved more contradictions than perhaps
attach to any similar event in history. A low-born and low-minded
tyrant was permitted to rule with the rod of the most frightful
despotism a people, whose anxiety for liberty had shortly before
rendered them unable to endure the rule of a humane and lawful
sovereign. A dastardly coward arose to the command of one of the bravest
nations in the world; and it was under the auspices of a man who dared
scarce fire a pistol, that the greatest generals in France began their
careers of conquest. He had neither eloquence nor imagination; but
substituted in their stead a miserable, affected, bombastic style,
which, until other circumstances gave him consequence, drew on him
general ridicule. Yet against so poor an orator, all the eloquence of
the philosophical Girondists, all the terrible powers of his associate
Danton, employed in a popular assembly, could not enable them to make an
effectual resistance. It may seem trifling to mention, that in a nation
where a good deal of prepossession is excited by amiable manners and
beauty of external appearance, the person who ascended to the highest
power was not only ill-looking, but singularly mean in person, awkward
and constrained in his address, ignorant how to set about pleasing even