placed above what is low, servile, and meanly ambitious, have a much greater probability of being distinguished by elevated ideas, and pure independent souls."

In reply to this assertion, it would suffice to point into the world. Where is independence more scarce than among the high-born? What class is more regularly prodigal in youth, and more frequently dependent in age, than the nobility? Elevation of sentiment generally results from the study of those writers, who have drawn the fairest models of human excellence. If it ought, as our author fancies, to be ascribed to early impressions, high-birth is in this respect disadvantageous; for, by a natural consequence of the hours and customs of the fashionable world, the children of the great are in their early years left more than others to the care of servants, and consequently receive their first impressions from persons of the lower ranks.

These volumes certainly merit perusal, and are evidently the production of no common writer.

ART. XII. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By William Godwin. Small 8vo. pp. 200. 3s. 6d. Boards. Johnson. 1798.

V ULGAR tears fall and evaporate without leaving any trace behind them: but the tear of affection is often chrystalised by the power of genius, and converted into a permanent literary brilliant. Mr. Godwin, whose abilities are indisputable, endeavours thus to dignify and render illustrious his sorrows for the loss of his wife; we therefore regret the necessity of observing that not only the general reader, but the most judicious and reflecting part of mankind, will arraign the prudence and the utility of these memoirs, though he himself commences them with this sentence of high expectation :-' there are not many individuals with whose character the public welfare and improvement are more ultimately connected, than the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.'

After an exordium so splendid, we could not expect to find such a narrative;-a narrative which we must indeed read with pity and concern, but which we should have advised the author to bury in oblivion. Blushes would suffuse the checks of most husbands, if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr. Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme excentricity of Mr. G.'s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with

respect, nor to suicide with horror. He relates with complacency of Mary Wollstonecraft, afterward his wife, that she cultivated a platonic affection for Mr. Fuseli the painter:-that she cohabited with Mr. Imlay as his wife, took his name, and had a child by him, without being married; and that she even lived with Mr. G. himself, and was pregnant by him; and that it was only her pregnancy which induced them to think of marriage; fearing that, otherwise, she might be excluded from society. He gravely records, also, (what was mentioned at the time in the Newspapers, and was considered by some persons as calumny,) her attempt to drown herself in the Thames, in consequence of the ill-treatment which she experienced from Mr. Imlay.

How the public welfare and improvement are connected with er can be advanced by the studied and uniform eulogium of such conduct will not be easily perceived; nor will any reader of discernment, who appreciates the merit of this unfortunate female, even on the evidence of her own husband, be able to say with him that there are no circumstances in her life that, in the judgment of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace.' Peace to her manes! She was the child of genius, but of suffering: of talents, but of error!

Most of the incidents which composed her short life are neither very singular nor very striking. Where she was born her husband does not know. She commenced the career of fame, like Milton, Sir Richard Blackmore, Dr. Johnson, and others, by keeping a school;-and she then became a writer for a bookseller, and an occasional critic. She attracted notice by entering the lists against Mr. Burke, and particularly by her Vindication of the Rights of Woman; by the publication of which, in the opinion of her biographer, she will perhaps be found to have performed more substantial service for the cause of her sex, than all the other writers, male or female, that ever felt themselves animated in the behalf of oppressed and injured beauty.' Though this must be deemed exaggerated praise, it may be forgiven from a husband, who, no doubt, most sincerely mourns her loss; and our other female authors must not take it amiss that he should wish to have is believed, that no female writer ever obtained so great a degree of celebrity throughout Europe.'

Mr. and Mrs. Godwin possessed congenial minds, and perhaps no two people better suited each other; though, (as this memoir relates) at the first time of their meeting, they did not reciprocally excite any very prepossessing impressions. At last, however, a strong and mutual affection took place, and ipened into love.

• There

• There was (Mr. G. says) no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love. Previously to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete.'

• Mary rested her head upon the shoulder of her lover, hoping to find a heart with which she might safely treasure her world of affection, fearing to commit a mistake, yet in spite of her melancholy experience, fraught with that generous confidence, which, in a great soul, is never extinguished. I had never loved till now; or, at least, had never nourished a passion to the same growth, or met with an object so consummately worthy.'

To this account of the sincerity and ardor of their mutual passion, it is concisely added-We did not marry;' and then follows this attempt at a justification:

• It is difficult to recommend any thing to indiscriminate adoption, contrary to the established rules and prejudices of mankind; but certainly nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to the general march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony, and that which, whereever delicacy and imagination exist, is of all things most sacredly private, to blow a trumpet before it, and to record the moment when it has arrived at its climax.'

Apprehending that this very refined and sentimental logic would not be sufficient to convince the public of the propriety of their conduct in this respect, Mr. G. adds- There were other reasons why we did not immediately marry. Mary felt an entire conviction of the propriety of her conduct.'-We question this. Her experience, with Mr. Imlay, of the miserable consequences to which a woman exposes herself by an unmarried connection, must have taught her the imprudence at least of disregarding the law of society respecting marriage. No evil may result from recording the vow of love: but many evils must result from a contempt of marriage. It is one of the first institutions that are essential to social order.

On this subject, however, Mr. G. rather gives his own opinions than those of his wife; or he exhibits her's with the colouring of his own system thrown over them. We apprehend that he has done this also in the account which he has given of her religion (p.33):

Her religion was, in reality, little allied to any system of forms; and, as she has often told me, was founded rather in taste, than in the niceties of polemical discussion. Her mind constitutionally at tached itself to sublime and the amiable. She an inexpres sible delight in the beauties of nature, and in the splendid reveries of the imagination. But nature itself, she thought, would be no better than a vast blank, if the mind of the observer did not supply it with an animating soul. When she walked amidst the wonders of nature, she was accustomed to converse with her God. To her mind

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mind he was pictured as not less amiable, generous and kind, than great, wise and exalted. In fact, she had received few lessons of religion in her youth, and her religion was almost entirely of her own creation. But she was not on that account the less attached to it, or the less scrupulous in discharging what she considered as its duties. She could not recollect the time when she had believed the doctrine of future punishments. The tenets of her system were the growth of her own moral taste, and her religion therefore had always been a gratification, never a terror, to her. She expected a future state; but she would not allow her ideas of that future state to be modified by the notions of judgment and retribution. From this sketch, it is sufficiently evident, that the pleasure she took in an occasional attendance upon the sermons of Dr. Price, was not accompanied with a superstitious adherence to his doctrines. The fact is, that, as far down as the year 1787, she regularly frequented public worship, for the most part according to the forms of the church of England. After that period her attendance became less constant, and in no long time was wholly discontinued. I believe it may be admitted as a maxim, that no person of a well furnished mind, that has shaken off the implicit subjection of youth, and is not the zealous partizan of a sect, can bring himself to conform to the public and regular routine of sermons and prayers.'

The matrimonial happiness which Mr. and Mrs. G. enjoyed was but of short continuance. Their marriage was declared in April 1797, and on the 10th of September following she died in childbed, aged 38. The last chapter relates the particulars of her death, perhaps with more than necessary minuteness: but Mr. G.'s feelings on the occasion do him credit, and it is impossible not to feel with him. It is added;

• Her remains were deposited on the 15th of September, at ten o'clock in the morning in the church-yard of the parish church of St. Pancras, Middlesex. A few of the persons she most esteemed attended the ceremony; and a plain monument is now erecting on the spot, by some of her friends, with the following inscription:

"Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,
"Author of

"A Vindication

" of the Rights of Woman.
" Born, XXVII April MDCCLIX.
"Died, X September MDCCXCVII."

A portrait of Mrs. Godwin is prefixed to this volume, engraved by Heath, from a painting by Opie.

ART

ART. XIII. Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Small 8vo. 4 Vols. about 190 Pages in each Volume. 1.4s. Boards. Johnson. 1798.

T HE contents of these posthumous volumes are a novel, or ratker the fragment of a novel, intitled "The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria;" -Lessons for a child; -a series of Letters to a gentleman (we conclude, Mr. Imlay) who lived with her for a short time at Paris in matrimonial intimacy, but without marriage, and who left her pregnant, and finally formed another attachment; -a letter on the present character of the French nation, written from Paris, Feb. 15, 1793;-an introductory letter on the management of infants, with heads for a series of letters on the subject; -letters to Mr. Johnson, the bookseller; -extract from the Cave of Fancy, a tale; -a short essay on Poetry, and our relish for the beauties of nature;and Hints, chiefly designed to have been incorporated in the Second Part of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Mr. Godwin, the editor, with a partiality which all readers of feeling will be tempted to excuse, supposes that, had his wife lived to fill up the sketch exhibited in the fragment intitled "The Wrongs of Woman," (which, in its present state, occupies the first and second volumes,) it would have given 'a new impulse to the manners of the world.' Novels, however, though generally read, and though it is now the practice to make them the vehicles of new opinions, do not make so permanent an impression on the mind as their authors may imagine. That writer must be vain indeed who fancies that, by a fictitious tale, however well told, and interspersed with fine sentiments, he can give a new impulse to the manners of the world. Had Mrs. Wollstonecraft Godwin lived to finish her " Maria," the story might have been more satisfactory to her readers: but its moral effect or utility would not, we apprehend, have been at all increased. It is a proof of her genius; and the incidents are designed to justify an opinion respecting marriage, which circumstances of her own history, together with her husband's system, might have impressed deeply on her mind, viz. that it is the source of the greatest evil in society, and that women particularly suffer by it: but we ought to recollect that a particular recital, whether real or feigned, of matrimonial vice and mi sery, is no argument against the institution of marriage; which, on the whole, as Dr. Johnson says, " is no otherwise unhappy than human life is unhappy." Though the laws concerning it are far from being perfect, and might be much improved, we should beware of lessening the respect that is due to this legitimate bond of love; and of so blackening the picture of married

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