but various ways of treating it.

This is one of the best instances of a marriage of friendship. It
was only friendship, whose basis was esteem; probably neither party
knew love, except by name. Roland was a good man, worthy to esteem,
and be esteemed; his wife as deserving of admiration as able to do
without it.

Madame Roland is the fairest specimen we yet have of her class; as
clear to discern her aim, as valiant to pursue it, as Spenser's
Britomart; austerely set apart from all that did not belong to her,
whether as Woman or as mind. She is an antetype of a class to which
the coming time will afford a field--the Spartan matron, brought by
the culture of the age of books to intellectual consciousness and
expansion. Self-sufficingness, strength, and clearsightedness were, in
her, combined with a power of deep and calm affection. She, too, would
have given a son or husband the device for his shield, "Return with it
or upon it;" and this, not because she loved little, but much. The
page of her life is one of unsullied dignity. Her appeal to posterity
is one against the injustice of those who committed such crimes in the
name of Liberty. She makes it in behalf of herself and her husband. I
would put beside it, on the shelf, a little volume, containing a
similar appeal from the verdict of contemporaries to that of mankind,
made by Godwin in behalf of his wife, the celebrated, the by most men
detested, Mary Wolstonecraft. In his view, it was an appeal from the
injustice of those who did such wrong in the name of virtue. Were this
little book interesting for no other cause, it would be so for the
generous affection evinced under the peculiar circumstances. This man
had courage to love and honor this woman in the face of the world's
sentence, and of all that was repulsive in her own past history. He