For hours, we grope after him in the vague shadows of political speculation, in the cold and perplexing mist of didactic generalities, trying in vain to make something out of his colorless tirades, and we grasp nothing.[3191] When we, in astonishment, ask ourselves what all this talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectarian preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening.

So much the better if the container is empty; the emptier it is the easier and faster the crank turns.

And better still, if the empty term he selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous words justice, humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a text from the gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burning of heretics .-- Through this extreme perversity, the cuistre spoils his own mental instrument; thenceforth he employs it as he likes, as his passions dictate, believing that he serves truth in serving these.
Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity.

Never was the chief of a party, sect or government, even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignificant rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and so dull .-- On the eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was a question of life or death, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written and re-written, polished and re-polished,[3192] overloaded with studied ornaments and bits for effect,[3193] coated by dint of time and labor, with the academic varnish, the glitter of symmetrical antitheses, rounded periods, exclamations, omissions, apostrophes and other tricks of the pen.[3194]--In the most famous and important of his reports,[3195] I have counted eighty-four instances of personifications[3196] imitated from Rousseau and the antique, many of them largely expanded, some addressed to the dead, to Brutus, to young Barra, and others to absentees, priests, and aristocrats, to the unfortunate, to French women, and finally to abstract substantives like Liberty and Friendship.

With unshaken conviction and intense satisfaction, he deems himself an orator because he harps on the same old tune.