"was intended For nothing else but to be mended."
Danger did not appal the sages of this school. Many of them had been familiar with, and hardened to the perils of the most desperate revolutionary intrigues, by their familiar acquaintance with the springs which set each in motion, and were ready to recommence their desperate labours with as little forethought as belongs to the labourers in a powder-mill, which has exploded ten times during their remembrance, and destroyed the greater number of their comrades. In the character of these self-entitled philosophers and busy agitators, vanity as well as egotism were leading principles. The one quality persuaded them, that they might be able, by dint of management, to avert danger from themselves; and the other rendered them indifferent respecting the safety of others.
During the government of Buonaparte, this Jacobinical party was repressed by a strong hand. He knew, by experience of every sort, their restless, intriguing, and dangerous disposition. They also knew and feared his strength, and his unscrupulous use of it. The return of the Bourbons called them into life, like the sun which thaws the frozen adder; but it was only to show how they hated the beams which revived them. The Bourbon dynasty, with all the remembrances it combined, seemed to this faction the very opposite to their favourite Revolution; and they studied with malignant assiduity the degree of liberty afforded by the national charter, not in order to defend or to enjoy it, but to discover how it might be made the vantage-ground for overthrowing both the throne and the constitution.
Carnot and Fouché, formidable names, and revolutionists from their youth upward, were the ostensible leaders of this active party, and most of the surviving revolutionists rallied under their standards. These agitators had preserved some influence over the lees of the people, and were sure to find the means of augmenting it in the moment of popular commotion. The rabble of a great town is democratical and revolutionary by nature; for their vanity is captivated with such phrases as the sovereignty of the people, their sense of poverty and licentious fury tempted by occasion for uproar, and they regard the restraints of laws and good order as their constant and natural enemies. It is upon this envenomed and corrupted mass of evil passions that the experimental philosophers of the Revolution have always exercised their chemical skill. Of late, however, the intercourse between the philosophers of the Revolution and this class of apt and docile scholars had been considerably interrupted. Buonaparte, as we have hinted, restrained with a strong hand the teachers of the Revolutionary school; while, by the eclat of his victories, his largesses, and his expensive undertakings, in which many workmen were employed, he debauched from them great part of their popular disciples, who may be said, with the inconsequence and mutability belonging to their habits, principles, and temper, to have turned imperialists, without losing their natural aptitude to become Jacobins again on the next tempting opportunity.