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62 she said, a male writer invariably gets the credit of it; if a bad one, she incurs the full ridicule of failure. She did not perceive that she was one of the few women who could have vindicated the claims of her sex, and in this respect she showed less originality than Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Staël, her juniors by a decade or so. In later life she considerably modified her views, and bitterly regretted having no time left to write, as, "if she could not be the Tacitus, she might, perhaps, have aspired to be the Mrs. Macaulay of the French Revolution."

At the same time we must bear in mind that it was not the literary or æsthetic, but the moral side of life which possessed the greatest attraction for Madame Roland. In her judgment the life of woman as wife and mother always appeared the highest and best. She perceived that every concentrated effort of the imagination tends to isolate the individual, and to disturb that equilibrium of the faculties which essentially constitutes the harmony of life. She considered no function more important than that of the woman of fine nature and cultivated faculties regulating a household or estate, with many people depending on her care and management, bringing up children in the consciousness that in them her soul is moulding the future of the race. Because, in the exercise of these duties, the most diversified attributes are called into play, love itself being its guiding principle. This was Manon's ideal of life for a woman, and it is practically that of the statesman and ruler in miniature.

But the very strength of her convictions as to the duties of wifehood and motherhood rendered marriage more difficult to her. Her decided views as to the bringing up of children nade her very critical as to