when the massacre of the 10th of August replaced power in the hands of the Gironde, Madame herself was the real minister whose hand traced the official letters, despatches, the telling reports and speeches, which her husband copied and read; albeit Madame herself only modestly claims 66 to have infused into her husband's writings that union of gentleness, of reasoning and sentiment, which only a woman can combine." That troubled and fantastic dream has passed away; and now, towards the close of 1793, the deputies of the Gironde, having celebrated their last supper-a profuse banquet, brilliant with lights and flowers, and enlivened by wine and eloquent speeches, to be thereafter carefully reported, touching the possibility of God and Immortality,—have followed Louis to the scaffold; and Madame Roland herself, who might, like her husband, have escaped the clutch of the assassins, but disdained to do so, has been arrested, and awaits in St. Pélagie the purely formal and inevitable decree of death, amusing herself meanwhile in writing memoirs, and passionate appeals to the Terrorists for justice in the name-poor prisoned maniac!——— of the sacred principles consecrated by the Revolution! Riouffe and other prisoners were enthusiastic in their admiration of the unquailing courage of the queenly woman. "Ah," sadly replied her female attendant, "you do not know all: before you, Madame calls up all her courage, but when in her own room, she sometimes stands for hours together, leaning against the window and weeping bitterly." At length, on the 9th November, 1793, Madame Roland stood before Fouquier Tinville's tribunal; was not, of course, permitted to be heard, and received sentence, which, upon returning to the prison, she communicated to her fellowcaptives by passing her hand sharply across her throat. Early on the following morning, the still beautiful woman—

she was in her thirty-ninth year only, and the peculiar character of her physiognomy reduced her apparent age by at least ten years—was bound in a cart, and slowly conveyed to execution. She was habited in a white muslin robe, her dark abundant tresses waved freely in the wind, and a smile of haughty scorn curled her finely-chiselled lips as they murmured, in reply to the hooting crowd who continued to shout "À la guillotine! à la guillotine!"—"I am going to the guillotine; they who send me there will soon follow, and you will hoot them also." Lamarche, an old man, fettered in the same cart, was overwhelmed with terror, which Madame Roland strove vainly to dispel, and passing a tall column, on the summit of which a statue of Liberty had been placed, she exclaimed, "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Another expression, of much greater significance and interest, is not so well known:"Can I have pen and paper?" she said, addressing the official who received her at the foot of the scaffold; "I would, if possible, write down the strange thoughts that are rising in my mind." The request was brutally refused, and a few moments afterwards Madame Roland had thought her last on earth!

The best evidence of the true womanly worth of Madame Roland is seen in the effect which her execution produced upon the minds of her husband and servants. M. Roland, as his wife predicted he would, slew himself a few hours after the intelligence reached him, "finding it impossible to live in a world where such a crime was permitted." Two servants, a man and woman, burst, in a paroxysm of grief and rage, into Fouquier Tinville's hall of doom, and denounced him and his myrmidons to their faces as villains and murderers The woman was held to be insane, and dismissed; the man's audacious tongue was silenced by the guillotine!

54

IT

CHRISTINA, QUEEN OF SWEDEN.

was this Queen's Chancellor, Axel Oxensteirn, who bade his son observe how slight an amount of wisdom was required for the governance of nations,-a reflection possibly suggested by the Chancellor's estimate of Christina's capacity, and her fame as a sovereign and quite as surprising and providential as the fact enunciated by Oxensteirn, is that of how slight a remedial agency suffices to save the foundering vessel of the State when most hopelessly emperilled, and restore realms, apparently undone, to pristine prosperity and power. The sun of England, as everybody knows, has been time out of mind on the very point of setting; but ever some fortunate chance-a brilliant speech, or triumphant division in either House-nay, the final state of the poll at a city or county election-has saved us, at the last moment, from being plunged in outer darkness. It may be doubted, however, judging from contemporary chronicles, that the great interests of humanity were at any time in such imminent and mortal peril as in the year 1632, or saved from ruin by such seemingly inadequate means. Gustavus-Adolphus, King of Sweden, Lion of the North, and Bulwark of the Protestant Faith, had fallen at the victory of Lutzen, in Upper Saxony; and not only was Sweden thought to have been thereby hurled from her place of pride and power, but the cause of Scriptural truth itself struck down in the person of its valiant champion, when, amidst the general consternation, Chancellor Oxensteirn reminded the assembled States that the slain hero had left a