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18 republicans: in both, his party has proved victorious. It was in the third that he himself was doomed to triumph, not only over his rivals, but his country.

The Commune of Paris, the Jacobin Society, and even the Assembly itself, were filled with his creatures, and became obedient to his commands. In short, the nation looked up to him as to a saviour.

No sooner, however, had he attained the giddy eminence of power, than his nature seems to have experienced a total change; and Robespierre, like many others, here affords a memorablo instance of the effects of sudden elevation in debasing the human mind, by making it ferocious. Rendered cruel by habit and suspicion, both royalists and republicans equally experienced his vengeance; a number of the first were cruelly butchered in prison; and of the latter, Brissot, Vergniaux, Gensonne, Valaze, &c., &c., fell by the guillotine; while the ex-minister Roland, and the celebrated ex-secretary Condorcet, were reduced to the melancholy necessity of putting themselves to death. In the Girondists perished nearly all that was great and amiable in France; in Madame Roland fell the first female genius of her age; in the person of her husband, virtue itself was outraged; while, in the executions of Condorcet, Lavoisier, and Bailly, science received a mortal and irrecoverable stab.

The proscriptions of Sylla and Marius were once more renewed in the most polished country of modern Europe, and in an age, too, boastful of its studied refinements. Suspected persons, or, in other words, every one either dreaded or hated by those in power, were arrested;