At the date of her letters Heloisa had been leading for years a monastic life, which she embraced against her will at the command of her husband. She had not been refined by misfortune, time, and religion. She continued to bewail her sensual deprivations, and the picture she draws of her subjection to her voluptuous imagination, exceeds anything which could have been expected from the most dissolute libertine. But none of these things repel the partisans of historic romance, and the frail unhappy woman seduced by Abelard is held up as a signal example of feminine excellence. "This noble creature," says M. Cousin, "loved as Saint Theresa, and sometimes wrote as Seneca."[572] "Her contemporaries," says M. Rémusat, "placed her above all women, and I do not know that posterity has belied her contemporaries"[573] "France," says M. Henri Martin, "has always felt the grandeur of Heloisa, and the just instinct of the public has numbered the mistress of Abelard among our national glories."[574] Her admirers would be puzzled to explain in what her pre-eminence consists. Her devotion to her lover is a quality which she shares with myriads of women, bad as well as good, and her distinctive moral traits are those in which she differs from the majority of her sex by being vastly worse instead of better. A modern Heloisa who pursued the same conduct and avowed the same principles and passions would be branded with infamy. The Epistle of Pope purports to be Heloisa's reply to Abelard's letter to his friend; but the poet has blended in his composition whatever topics were suited to his purpose, and ascribed sentiments to the wife which he had copied from the husband. There is nothing in the work to indicate that the author had read the Latin text, since he always adheres to the English rendering of the corrupted French version. Bishop Horne held that the original prose was finer than Pope's verse.[575] I cannot assent to this judgment. The poem has the superiority in every particular--in the beauty of the language, in the picturesqueness of the descriptions, in the fervour of the contrasted passions, in the animation of the transitions, in the solemnity of the accompaniments, and above all, in the pathos. The singularity of Horne's estimate may be explained by his imperfect recollection of the productions he criticised. To the allegation of Sir John Hawkins, that matrimony was depreciated and concubinage justified in the poetical epistle, he replies, that the censure "is founded on a false fact, because Abelard was married." The observation is a proof that Horne had forgotten the argument in favour of concubinage which occurs alike in the English verse and the Latin prose. Hallam accuses Pope of having "done great injustice to Eloisa by putting the sentiments of a coarse and abandoned woman into her mouth." But the licentious doctrines which Pope utters in her name are in the original Latin, except that when she asserts that