were hers which persuaded William Pitt to abstain so long from intervention in the affairs of France, in that time of English terror and hope, which furnished arguments to Fox, and which drew from Burke those efforts of massive reason and gorgeous imagination which will endure as long as the language itself.  The counsel by which she had disentangled the perplexity of wisest men had been repeated by them to applauding senates in tones less eloquent than those by which they had been received, and triumph had followed.  In none of these efforts did she avow herself.  She shrank from the honors which solicited her, though the world knew that they came from her just as the world knows that moon and planets shine with the reflected light of a hidden sun.  But now, when thus assailed, she resolved to speak personally and for herself.  And so, sitting in her cell, she wrote in concealment and sent out by trusty hands, in cantos, that autobiography in which she appealed to posterity, and by which posterity has been convinced.  She traced her career from earliest childhood down to the very brink of the grave into which she was looking.  Her intellectual, affectional and mental history are all there written with a hand as steady and a mind as serene as though she were at home, with her baby sleeping in its cradle by her side.  Here are found history, philosophy, political science, poetry, and ethics as they were received and given out again by one of the most receptive and imparting minds ever possessed by woman.  She knew that husband, home, child, and friends were not for her any more, and that very soon she was to see the last of earth from beside the headsman and from the block, and yet she turned from all regret and fear, and summoned the great assize of posterity, “of foreign nations and the next ages,” to do her justice.  There was no sign of fear.  She looked as calmly on what she knew she must soon undergo as the spirit released into never-ending bliss looks back upon the corporeal trammels from which it has just earned its escape.

There are those who believe that a woman can not be great as she was and still be pure.  These ghouls of history will to the end of time dig into the graves where such queens lie entombed.  This woman has slept serenely for nearly a century.  Sweet oblivion has dimmed with denial and forgetfulness the obloquy which hunted her in her last days.  Tears such as are shed for vestal martyrs have been shed for her, and for all her faults she has the condonation of universal sorrow.  Nothing but the evil magic of sympathetic malice can restore these calumnies, and even then they quickly fade away in the sunlight of her life.  Nothing can touch her further.  Dismiss them with the exorcism of Carlyle, grown strangely tender and elegiac here.  “Breathe not thy poison breath!  Evil speech!  That soul is taintless; clear as the mirror sea.”  She was brought to trial.  The charge against her was, “That there has existed a horrible conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the French people; that Marie Jeanne Phlipon, wife of Jean Marie Roland has been one of the abettors or accomplices of that conspiracy.”  This was the formula by which this woman was killed, and it simply meant that the Gironde had existed and that she had sympathized with it.