endearments of words and of acts of some of the most beautiful, fascinating, and tender women of the period, and maintaining amid every scene of passion and affection, with the background of the guillotine, and all the horrors and abysses of the time― maintaining amid all this the same coldness of heart, the same frigid outlook of the eye― it is a picture of a human being which makes me at once bewildered and aghast! Robespierre must have been blind in that great interview between him and Barras not to have seen the depths of inflexibility, cruelty, and resolve which were in the eyes of Barras. Or would it not be more correct to say that Robespierre was too clear-sighted, and that his frozen silence― his refusal to utter even one word, to give an indication by one look― was his instinctive sense of the kind of man with whom he was dealing? Robespierre was a highly nervous and sensitive man; his enemies declare that he was an arrant coward. He certainly had not firmness of nerve. In the weeks that preceded the final struggle for his life he went to a shooting-gallery to steady his nerves by pistol practice. He fainted after the first shot!
X.
TWO PORTRAITS― BARRAS AND ROBESPIERRE.
Look at the portraits of the two men which are in these volumes; and, perchance, they may
