to reproach herself with having once forgotten it, and with having
omitted what another might have considered the tedious recollection of
the condemnation of Phocion. She never wearied of these examples. But
it is her inexhaustible freshness in these things that has helped other
writers of her time to weary us.

In her manner of telling her story there is an absence of all
exaggeration, which gives the reader a constant sense of security. That
virtue of style and thought was one she proposed to herself and attained
with exact consciousness of success. It would be almost enough (in the
perfection of her practice) to make a great writer; even a measure of it
goes far to make a fair one. Her moderation of statement is never
shaken; and if she now and then glances aside from her direct narrative
road to hazard a conjecture, the error she may make is on the generous
side of hope and faith. For instance, she is too sure that her Friends
(so she always calls the _Girondins_, using no nicknames) are safe,
whereas they were then all doomed; a young man who had carried a harmless
message for her--a mere notification to her family of her arrest--receives
her cheerful commendation for his good feeling; from a note we learn that
for this action he suffered on the scaffold and that his father soon
thereafter died of grief. But Madame Roland never matched such a
delirious event as this by any delirium of her own imagination. The
delirium was in things and in the acts of men; her mind was never hurried
from its sane self-possession, when the facts raved.

It was only when she used the rhetoric ready to her hand that she stooped
to verbal violence; _et encore_! References to the banishment of
Aristides and the hemlock of Socrates had become toy daggers and bending
swords in the hands of her compatriots, and she is hardly to be accused
of violence in brandishing those weapons. Sometimes, refuse rhetoric
being all too ready, she takes it on her pen, in honest haste, as though
it were honest speech, and stands committed to such a phrase as this:
"The dregs of the nation placed such a one at the helm of affairs."

But her manner was not generally to write anything but a clear and
efficient French language. She never wrote for the love of art, but
without some measure of art she did not write; and her simplicity is
somewhat altered by that importunate love of the Antique. In "Bleak
House" there is an old lady who insisted that