could discourse wisely and well on the vast, complex questions which
superior men, specially devoted to them, hesitate to take up. At first
this presumption existed in him only in germ, and, in ordinary times,
it would have remained, for lack of nourishment, as dry-rot or
creeping mold, But the heart knows not what strange seeds it contains!
Any of these, feeble and seemingly inoffensive, needs only air and
sunshine to become a noxious excrescence and a colossal plant. Whether
third or fourth rate attorney, counselor, surgeon, journalist, curé,
artist, or author, the Jacobin is like the shepherd that has just
found, in one corner of his hut, a lot of old parchments which entitle
him to the throne. What a contrasts between the meanness of his
calling and the importance with which the theory invests him! With
what rapture he accepts a dogma that raises him so high in his own
estimation! Diligently conning the Declaration of Rights, the
Constitution, all the official documents that confer on him such
glorious prerogatives, charging his imagination with them, he
immediately assumes a tone befitting his new position.[23] -- Nothing
surpasses the haughtiness and arrogance of this tone. It declares
itself at the outset in the harangues of the clubs and in the
petitions to the Constituent Assembly. Loustalot, Fréron, Danton,
Marat, Robespierre, St. Just, always employ dictatorial language, that
of the sect, and which finally becomes the jargon of their meanest
valets. Courtesy or toleration, anything that denotes regard or
respect for others, find no place in their utterances nor in their
acts; a swaggering, tyrannical conceit creates for itself a language
in its own image, and we see not only the foremost actors, but their
minor associates, enthroned on their grandiloquent platform. Each in
his own eyes is Roman, savior, hero, and great man.

"I stood in the tribune of the palace," writes Anarcharsis