Could his eye have been lit with animation as he ascended the scaffold! Could his foot have then stepped with confidence! Could he have gloried in his death! Poor mutilated worm, agonised in body and in soul.

Can it be ascribed to want of courage in him, that his last moments were passed in silent agony and despair?
Honesty, moral conduct, industry, constancy of purpose, temperance in power, courage, and love of country: these virtues all belonged to Robespierre; history confesses it, and to what favoured hero does history assign a fairer catalogue?
Whose name does a brighter galaxy adorn?
With such qualities, such attributes, why was he not the Washington of France?
Why, instead of the Messiah of freedom, which he believed himself to be, has his name become a bye-word, a reproach, and an enormity?
Because he wanted faith! He believed in nothing but himself, and the reasoning faculty with which he felt himself to be endowed.

He thought himself perfect in his own human nature, and wishing to make others perfect as he was, he fell into the lowest abyss of crime and misery in which a poor human creature ever wallowed.

He seems almost to have been sent into the world to prove the inefficacy of human reason to effect human happiness.

He was gifted with a power over common temptation, which belongs to but few.