In Cobbe's narrative of her life, sublimity, heroism, and a quixotic heroism make up the actions of Irelanders (most who were friends with Cobbe) who were virtuous. The first, an Elliot Warburton, in the destruction of a vessel in the mid-Atlantic, died taking position next to the captain as passengers filled lifeboats and as the vessel went up in flames. This act was considered sublime by Cobbe, perhaps because thinking dominated, taking over physical action, because it showed an unshakeable comraderie between the captain and citizen sailor, and because Eliot's effeminate side105 was changed through the imprint of his body, his "pale face" and "puny frame" on Cobbe's intellectual memory of the event. Her conclusion: he was a "true hero." The second hero was Thomas Purnell, who spent his fortune on a project that would answer every question of the human mind through a rearranging of biblical texts. He "devoted his life and fortune," working in a "bare, gloomy, dusty room"for decades. The third was the Marquis of Downshire who, with collosal strength, killed two men by accident and was once trampled by a herd of sheep (he lived).
For these Irishmen work is mysteriously silent; none were orators in their virtuous activity like Maximillian Marie Robespierre, who was considered monstrous and tyrranical by the Thermidorians (a party of French revolutionaries), but who spoke for progress in France and is now thought to be not an honest adjudicator, but a sort of student and performer of virtue. David P. Jordan outlines Robespierre's feelings about virtue and his most studied observations, saying that with the revolution going on in France the people could be virtuous by being patriotic. Jordan says that Patriotism was a public virtue because virtuous men had received back their country in the revolution. Before the Revolution, Robespierre had thought that virtue was only a private matter.
Robespierre's understanding of how he himself was virtuous stemmed from his special relationship to virtuous men in history, which he assumed and appropriated. His gesture of distinction (in the Bourdieusian sense) was to remove religion, putting his faith into man's salvation through history106. Power Cobbe indicates the connection between virtue and Quixoticism, a Quixoticism, that while decked with "wholesome" flavors in Cobbe's Irelanders, is still closer than immediately apparant, to the materialist reforms of the church, Voltaire's Deism, Diderot's Epicureanism, and Robespierre's position between the two.
.30. Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe by herself in two
volumes. New York: Haughton, Mifflin and Company, 1894. p. 6.
As half my life is connected with this dear old place, I hope
the reader will be able to imagine it as it was in my youth,
bright and smiling and yet dignified; bosomed among its old trees
and with the green, wide-spreading park opened out before the
noble granite perron of the hall door.
31. Jordan, David P. The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. New York and London: The Free Press, 1985.
Stanislas-Louis Marie Freron, who knew Robespierre personally, recalled his love of oranges, which were thought to aid a bilious digestion. One could always tell where Robespierre had sat at the table: the place was littered by a pile of orange peels.'
104. see the index for virtue and vice in Diderot, Dennis. Political Writings. trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
105. Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe by herself in two volumes. New York: Haughton, Mifflin and Company, 1894. v. i p.166. 'One was poor Elliot Warburton, the author of The Crescent and the Cross... ...He was vert refined and, as we considered rather effeminate; but how grand, even sublime, was he in his death!'
106. Jordan, David P. The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. New York and London: The Free Press, 1985. p. 229. Robespierre's prophetic, sometimes messianic invocations of things to come were acts of his faith in man's salvation through history. Longer and more consistently than any of his comrades or rivals, he insisted that fallen man could, must, "be made to want his painful redemption.'
31. Jordan, David P. The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. New York and London: The Free Press, 1985.
Stanislas-Louis Marie Freron, who knew Robespierre personally, recalled his love of oranges, which were thought to aid a bilious digestion. One could always tell where Robespierre had sat at the table: the place was littered by a pile of orange peels.'
104. see the index for virtue and vice in Diderot, Dennis. Political Writings. trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
105. Cobbe, Frances Power. Life of Frances Power Cobbe by herself in two volumes. New York: Haughton, Mifflin and Company, 1894. v. i p.166. 'One was poor Elliot Warburton, the author of The Crescent and the Cross... ...He was vert refined and, as we considered rather effeminate; but how grand, even sublime, was he in his death!'
106. Jordan, David P. The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. New York and London: The Free Press, 1985. p. 229. Robespierre's prophetic, sometimes messianic invocations of things to come were acts of his faith in man's salvation through history. Longer and more consistently than any of his comrades or rivals, he insisted that fallen man could, must, "be made to want his painful redemption.'
