to the king a letter which
drove her husband from power, and which, when read by the people,
compelled the king to restore him. She had written a dispatch to the
pope, claiming rights for certain French in Rome, in which the sanctity
of his office and the dignity of her country was respected, appealed to,
and asserted. It is said that the state papers were hers which persuaded
William Pitt to abstain so long from intervention in the affairs of
France, in that time of English terror and hope, which furnished
arguments to Fox, and which drew from Burke those efforts of massive
reason and gorgeous imagination which will endure as long as the
language itself. The counsel by which she had disentangled the
perplexity of wisest men had been repeated by them to applauding senates
in tones less eloquent than those by which they had been received, and
triumph had followed. In none of these efforts did she avow herself. She
shrank from the honors which solicited her, though the world knew that
they came from her just as the world knows that moon and planets shine
with the reflected light of a hidden sun. But now, when thus assailed,
she resolved to speak personally and for herself. And so, sitting in her
cell, she wrote in concealment and sent out by trusty hands, in cantos,
that autobiography in which she appealed to posterity, and by which
posterity has been convinced. She traced her career from earliest
childhood down to the very brink of the grave into which she was
looking. Her intellectual, affectional and mental history are all there
written with a hand as steady and a mind as serene as though she were at
home, with her baby sleeping in its cradle by her side. Here are found
history, philosophy, political science, poetry, and ethics as they were
received and given out again by one of the most receptive and imparting
minds ever possessed by woman. She knew that husband, home, child, and
friends were not for her any more, and that very soon she was to see the
last of earth from beside the headsman and from the block, and yet she
turned from all regret and fear, and summoned the great assize of
posterity, "of foreign nations and the next ages," to do her justice.
There was no sign of fear. She looked as calmly on what she knew she
must soon undergo as the spirit released into never-ending bliss looks
back upon the corporeal trammels from which it has just earned its
escape.

There are those who believe that a woman can not be