He was indifferent, he was known. The sensitiveness to pleasure was
gone, and the sensitiveness to pain, slights, and neglect would
thenceforth be suffered to rest; no man in England would put that to
proof again. No man in England, did I say? But, indeed, that is not so.
No slight to him, to his person, or to his fame could have had power to
cause him pain more sensibly than the customary, habitual, ready-made
ridicule that has been cast by posterity upon her whom he loved for
twenty years, prayed for during thirty-two years more, who satisfied one
of the saddest human hearts, but to whom 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.