'Courage,' and with a light step she passed on to face her judges. On her return from the tribunal she smilingly drew her hand over the back of her neck, to indicate to her fellowprisoners by that significant gesture that she was to die on the

morrow.

I thank you,' she had said to her judges on hearing her sentence, 'I thank you that you have thought me worthy to share the fate of the great and good men you have murdered: I will try to show on the scaffold as much courage as they?'

The next day, in the afternoon, she took her seat in the fatal cart, with one only companion, a poor terror-stricken wretch, named Lamarche, whose courage she strove to uphold during the long journey to the scaffold. Their way lay along the quays, and she had long in view the house which she had inhabited for so many years during her happy youth, at the corner of the PontNeuf and the Quai des Orfèvres. There was the window at which she used to sit to write her long letters to Sophie-the window from which she had so often seen- -as she now sawthe sun setting behind the heights of Chaillot. Whatever may have been her thoughts, she showed no weakness, and seemed intent only on cheering her companion. Even at the foot of the scaffold she forgot her own misery in that of another: Go up 'first,' she said to Lamarche, you would not have the strength ' to see me die;' and as the executioner seemed to hesitate, she turned to him with a smile, and added: You cannot, surely, 'refuse a woman her last request?'

Her last words are well known. A colossal statue of Liberty stood on the Place de la Révolution--a mud and plaster statue, fit emblem of the liberty of the day. Raising her eyes towards it, she exclaimed: O! Liberté! comme on t'a jouée!' and placed her head under the guillotine."

**

*Not the least curious feature of those times was the prevalence of a monomania which seized certain men-of an otherwise gentle and humane nature-to attend every execution. Day after day they were to be found at the foot of the scaffold, never wearying of the dreadful spectacle. M. Bertin was one of these singular amateurs of death. He was a royalist at heart, but he pronounced that no victim had shown more undaunted courage than Madame Roland, and he used to give a proof which in the present physiological age will perhaps be considered convincing. When her head fell, two 'powerful jets of blood spouted up from the mutilated trunk. This was a very rare circumstance,' he said; 'in general the head used 'to fall quite discoloured, and the blood, which fear or emotion had 'driven back to the heart, trickled out slowly drop by drop-she 'died full of life.'

Madame Roland had predicted that her husband would not survive her, nor was she mistaken. Roland had taken refuge near Rouen with some female friends of old standing. When he heard of his wife's death he deliberated whether he would commit suicide, or give himself up to his enemies; and, strange to say, he held counsel with his hostesses on the subject. By their advice, and in order that his fortune should not be lost to his little daughter-as would have been the case had he suffered death on the scaffold-he determined to kill himself. He took leave of his friends, and going a little way out of the town, he stabbed himself with a dagger. He was found quite dead, sitting by the roadside, like a weary wayfarer.

Buzot's fate was more fearful still. For months he wandered about the neighbourhood of Bordeaux, hunted out from every hiding-place in succession. In the month of July 1794, his body, with that of Pétion, was found, half devoured by wolves, in a cornfield near Castillon. It was never known whether they had died of hunger or by their own hand.

It is a very trite saying that historical characters should be viewed by the light of their own times, and we believe that there are very few readers, and still fewer writers, who do not firmly intend to abide by that rule when they sit in judgment on past generations. Under the most ordinary circumstances, however, it is not always easy to hold fast by it, while in some instances, like the present, the observance of this first principle of historic justice presents almost unconquerable difficulties. The light of the times in which Madame Roland lived was the blinding glare of a vast conflagration, illumining at first the world, then subsiding into lurid gloom with intervals of blaze and still more threatening darkness. As we look upon it through the distance of time, strange and fearful figures are seen hurrying to and fro in apparent confusion-some striving to extend, others to repress the wide-spread destruction, some bent on a work of deliverance, others on rapine and revenge. Each group of men stands out for one moment in bold outline on the flaming sky, they grapple hand to hand with some fierce enemy, and then leap wildly or are cast into the furnace. As one by one they pass across the terrific background, magnified in size and distorted in shape, it is no easy task to estimate their real stature or even to understand their movements. Still more difficult is it to portray them. Terror, pity, horror and admiration are powerful obstacles to accuracy and impartiality.

Madame Roland, if measured by the ordinary standard of an Englishwoman of the present day, must be condemned. According to our modern notions, she was neither gentle, nor

pious, nor delicate, nor even virtuous; she would not be considered an amiable, certainly not a loveable woman-perhaps we may say, in some respects, she would scarcely seem a woman at all. But viewed by that strange light of her own times, she stands out in noble and lofty preeminence. In judging her politically and morally, we have striven to keep her contemporaries in view. If we have not succeeded in showing her relative goodness, then our labour has been spent in vain. Of her greatness, if heroism is greatness, there can be no doubt. She was a heroine, and should be measured by the heroic standard. Nor ought characters such as her's to be scanned too closely. Minute criticism, in such cases, can only serve to obscure, instead of enlightening, our judgment. By too near an inspection we lose the grandeur of the general outline. We should look at the great features of Madame Roland's life. A sort of religious earnestness when scepticism and indifference reigned; a living sense of duty when impulse was obeyed as the only law; sensual passion trampled under foot when all was license around; patriotism and the love of liberty overruling all other feelings: such are the great lines that strike us at first. And then the end! If it be true that death is the great touchstone, then indeed Madame Roland comes out triumphant from the trial. A death such as her's would suffice almost to redeem crime, much more to efface mere errors of judgment.

Some fears have been expressed lest the life of Madame Roland should prove a dangerous example. As regards her countrywomen, we should say there was little danger. The tendencies of modern Frenchwomen lie in quite another direction. An inordinate love of liberty, an undue wish for political power, and the desire to excite men to intemperate deeds, are not among their faults. Their policy is, in general, the policy of expediency. Their influence, for many years, has been exerted in favour of triumphant force, and, with few exceptions, they have used their power to convert husbands, brothers, and lovers to the theory of the righteousness of success. The cause that Cato favoured has found no support in modern times with the women of France, and they have almost invariably sided with the gods and the victor of the day. Under these circumstances, Madame Roland's great and noble qualities, her ardent patriotism, her earnestness, her lofty ambition, her love of liberty --in a word, her truly virile virtues-may, in spite of some unfeminine vehemence and coarseness, receive the honours to which they entitle her. There is little fear that they will find too many imitators among the female subjects of Napoleon III.

ART. V.-History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By W. E. H. LECKY, M.A. 2 vols. London: 1865.

WE opened these volumes, never having heard the name of their author, and entirely ignorant of his pretensions to a place in English literature. We closed them, with the conviction that Mr. Lecky is one of the most accomplished writers and one of the most ingenious thinkers of the time, and that his book deserves the highest commendation we can bestow upon it. Indeed, it has seldom been our good fortune to take up an essay by an unknown, and we presume, a young, author so remarkable for the purity and eloquence of its style, so replete with varied erudition, appropriately introduced to illustrate and enliven argument, or so distinguished for broad and dispassionate views. Since the late Mr. Buckle took the town by storm with his theory of human affairs, which suddenly raised him into notoriety, we have not met with any work of so much originality and power. In some respects Mr. Lecky may be regarded as an offset from Mr. Buckle, for whose writings he professes great admiration. There is a sort of family resemblance between them, as well in their subject as in their treatment of it. Both of them are enthusiastic advocates of the progress of mankind; both of them attribute that progress mainly to the conquests of human reason; and both of them bring to their work a prodigious amount of reading and great speculative ingenuity, expressed in a clear and flowing style. But in many respects we prefer the volumes now before us to the History of Civilisation in England.' Mr. Lecky is happily free from that love of paradox which hurried Mr. Buckle into a multitude of reckless assertions to support untenable theories. He is free from that malignant and unjust spirit Mr. Buckle continually displayed by sneering at everything from which he had the misfortune to differ. Above all, whilst Mr. Buckle's view of human history tended to degrade the nature of man, by representing him as the mere slave of the physical circumstances that control his destiny, Mr. Lecky refuses to enthral the human mind by arithmetical averages and a material origin. His very first object in his Introduction is to vindicate the freedom of the human will, and to explain the recurrence of moral phenomena by causes far removed from the statistical evidence which denotes it. Again, Mr. Buckle's work, with its vast philosophical pretensions, is singularly devoid of method; he had projected a scheme which

he never realised, and which he lived long enough to perceive to be beyond his power of execution: he was carried away by the torrent of his own thoughts, and his original design was lost in the efforts he made to fulfil it. Mr. Lecky, on the contrary, has proposed to himself a definite object and has accomplished it. Every portion of his work is coherent and consistent; every page bears upon the truths he wishes to elucidate; and although his powers of illustration are not inferior to those of Mr. Buckle, he never allows them to distract him from the course of systematic reasoning he intends to follow. Thus although the starting point of the two works is almost identical, they point, like two streams having their source in one range of hills, in opposite directions. Mr. Buckle, followed to his furthest consequences, would have reduced the world to a mechanical creation of the Gods (if Gods they be) of Epicurus: Mr. Lecky, though equally opposed to the errors and superstitions which have, at various times, been engendered and sanctioned by theological authority, sees in the great principles of religion an indispensable element of civilisation, he admits the services which religion in all her multifarious forms has rendered to civilisation, and he regards a broad and enlightened application of the precepts of Christianity as the consummation of all that the human race can hope to attain to. The sum of his doctrine may thus be expressed in his own words, that ' amid the transformation or dissolution of intellectual dogmas, the great moral principles of Christianity continually reappear, acquiring new power in the lapse of ages, and influencing the type of each succeeding civilisation.' (Vol. ii. p. 249.)

It will therefore at once be seen that although this book deals severely with many forms of error, and of theological error amongst the rest, and unrolls a melancholy picture of the absurdities and crimes which have been believed or committed in the name of religion, it is in no sense an irreligious or an anti-religious book. Quite the contrary; and although we ourselves may not agree with Mr. Lecky in his view of the historical evidences of Christianity and the dogmatical tenets of the Christian Church, these topics are not prominently discussed by him, but on the contrary, while he denounces certain opinions which have, he thinks, exercised a pernicious influence on the world, he shows that these are not the essential truths of Christianity, but have, on the contrary, been engrafted upon it by the prejudices or ignorance of men.

*We have expressed our admiration of Mr. Lecky's style, and indeed it is scarcely possible to praise it too highly for its singular