hom the world, assiduous to admire
him, hardly accords human dignity. He wrote praises of her manners and
of her person for her tomb. But her epitaph, that does not name her, is
in the greatest of English prose. What was favour to him? "I am
indifferent . . . I am known . . . I am solitary, and cannot impart it."

MADAME ROLAND

The articulate heroine has her reward of appreciation and her dues of
praise; it is her appropriate fortune to have it definitely measured, and
generally on equal terms. She takes pains to explain herself, and is
understood, and pitied, when need is, on the right occasions. For
instance, Madame Roland, a woman of merit, who knew her "merit's name and
place," addressed her memoirs, her studies in contemporary history, her
autobiography, her many speeches, and her last phrase at the foot of the
undaunting scaffold, to a great audience of her equals (more or less)
then living and to live in the ages then to come--her equals and those
she raises to her own level, as the heroic example has authority to do.

Another woman--the Queen--suffered at that time, and suffered without the
command of language, the exactitude of phrase, the precision of
judgement, the proffer of prophecy, the explicit sense of Innocence and
Moderation oppressed in her person. These were Madame Roland's; but the
other woman, without eloquence, without literature, and without any
judicial sense of history, addresses no mere congregation of readers.
Marie Antoinette's unrecorded pangs pass into the treasuries of the
experience of the whole human family. All that are human have some part
there; genius itself may lean in contemplation over that abyss of woe;
the great poets themselves may look into its distances and solitudes.
Compassion here has no measure and no language. Madame Roland speaks
neither to genius nor to complete simplicity; Marie Antoinette holds her
peace in the presence of each, dumb in her presence.

Madame Roland had no dumbness of the spirit, as history, prompted by her
own musical voice, presents her to a world well prepared to do her
justice. Of that justice she had full expectation; justice here, justice
in the world--the world that even when universal philosophy should reign
would be inevitably the world of mediocrity; justice that would come of
enlightened views; justice that would be the lesson learnt by the nations
widely educated up to some point generally accessible; justice well
wi