which, to a vain, dissipated, proud, impatient woman, must have been
hard to bear. Now, if Shakespere had drawn the character of the Duchess
de Longueville, he would have shown us the same individual woman in both
situations:--for the same being, with the same faculties and passions
and powers, it surely was: whereas in history, we see in one case a fury
of discord, a woman without modesty or pity; and in the other an angel
of benevolence, and a worshipper of goodness; and nothing to connect the
two extremes in our fancy.

[3] The Jansenist.

"_Medon._ But these are contradictions which we meet on every page of
history, which make us giddy with doubt or sick with belief; and are the
proper objects of inquiry for the moralist and the philosopher."

* * * * *

With a true eye for the refined and the beautiful, and that honestly
sympathetic nature without which it is impossible to discriminate
between what is noble and what is mediocre, still Mrs. Jameson, in the
above reflections upon the character of Madame de Longueville, was
obviously led to draw hasty and erroneous conclusions either from a
superficial glance at detached passages in the Duchess's extraordinary
career with regard to the dates of which she is widely in error, or
others during which her conduct and actions were but too easily
susceptible of misrepresention and distortion at the hands of partisan
writers. Such unjust judgment would most probably be formed by accepting
anecdotes, like those contained in Tallemant's scandalous chronicle or
Bussy Rabutin's "Letters," as historic truths; or by placing implicit
faith in every statement made by De Retz or La Rochefoucauld, given as
both were to exaggeration and over-colouring, and whose object,
moreover, was not so much to tell the truth as always to exalt
themselves, sometimes by its suppression, at others by downright
falsification.

Without attempting to extenuate the errors of Madame de Longueville,
moral or political, it has been the author's endeavour to reconcile the
apparent contradictions in her character, imputed in the passage above
cited, by assigning the different incidents, which have doubtless caused
an intelligent woman to falter in her judgment, to their proper place in
the order of time. For as, during the Olympian contests, swift-footed
Spartan boys, to typify the transmission of Truth, ran with a lighted
torch, and, as each fell breathless, another t