ABSTRACT
Henry Yorke was reverting to the traditional vocabulary of older English ideologists: to sobriety, prudence, caution and care. These had been most admirable features of the English past: "our forefathers at the time of the revolution," whether they were "new-modelling" or restoring, "affected no visionary schemes of speculative perfection". Bertrand Barere speech was full of that revolutionary energy and of that popular style which is calculated to inflame people's minds, especially when joined to the dangerous effects produced by that species of dramatic representation and by that spectacle of rags and blood-stained garments. Barere's mind is cast back to the spectacle of Antony waving the bloodstained robe of Caesar in the Forum; and then he records that "The galleries cheered this petition with a violent unanimity which was terrifying". He claims that he tried, with calming words of his own, to work on the "pitch of agitation and public effervescence"; but to little avail.
