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 within earthly sight and competence.  This confidence was also her reward.  For what justice did the Queen look?  Here it is the “abyss that appeals to the abyss.”

Twice only in the life of Madame Roland is there a lapse into silence, and for the record of these two poor failures of that long, indomitable, reasonable, temperate, explicit utterance which expressed her life and mind we are debtors to her friends.  She herself has not confessed them.  Nowhere else, whether in her candid history of herself, or in her wise history of her country, or in her judicial history of her contemporaries, whose spirit she discerned, whose powers she appraised, whose errors she foresaw; hardly in her thought, and never in her word, is a break to be perceived; she is not silent and she hardly stammers; and when she tells us of her tears—­the