She was buried in the yard of the parish church of St. Pancras, Middlesex; and over her grave her friends erected a plain monument, on which is the following inscription:MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,

'AUTHOR OF

A VINDICATION

OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN.

BORN XXII APRIL, MDCCLIX.

DIED X SEPTEMBER, MDCCXCVII.

Thus perished at the early age of 38, a woman of extraordinary mental powers, and originally of a noble disposition, who with better training in youth, and less hard trials in opening womanhood, might have been a bright ornament to her age. When her death was made known to the world, there were found many who did not hesitate to aver that the Divine Power had cut her days short in order to make her an awful warning to those who lightly regard the marriage bed. Let us say farewell to her memory,

Owning her weakness,

Her evil behaviour,

And leaving with meekness

Her sins to her Saviour.

After her death Godwin published, in four volumes, a sketch of her life, and some of her manuscripts that had not before been printed. Amongst these were fragments of an unfinished novel, called "The Wrongs of Woman," a tale in a stilted and inflated style; and her charming letters to the pitiful scamp-Mr. Imlay.

CHAPTER XX.

WILLIAM GODWIN.

WHOEVER looks attentively at any tolerably faithful portrait of William Godwin must read the entire character of the man. The gentle expression of the countenance, the calm intelligence of the eyes and high forehead, the pensive air of the slight and regular features of the face, the small tightly-closing lips, indicating an inflexibility of will, ready to be provoked into obstinacy, all tell a truthful tale. Dispassionate (most wonderfully so for a republican in such times), anxious to be free from prejudice, charitable to opponents, cautious in action and courageous in thought, William Godwin was in respect of moral qualifications eminently adapted to play the part of a philosophic teacher, but he lacked one indispensable requisite for such a position -intellectual powers of the highest order. With mental endowments, only slightly, if at all, above average, he engaged in a labour that requires all, and more than all, the genius and iron strength of John Stuart Mill.

Dissent from orthodox views was early inculcated in William Godwin, and he inherited a disposition to question established opinions from at least two generations of his ancestors. His father was a dissenting minister, and so was his grandfather.

On the 3rd of March, in the year 1756, a full century from this present time, William was born at Wisbeach, in Cambridgeshire, where his father presided over a Nonconformist congregation. Four years after his birth he was taken to another village, sixteen miles from Norwich, where his father also had professional employment.

VOL. I.

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Probably the boy's education in his early years was a decent one, notwithstanding the humble position of his father, and the large number of little brothers and sisters who had also to be provided for out of the paternal income. Anyhow he was placed with a private tutor at Norwich, in the year 1767, for the purpose of receiving a classical education, and in 1773 he entered as a student the Dissenters' college at Hoxton.

After quitting this seminary he commenced his struggle with the world as a dissenting minister. For some time he officiated at the agreeable little town of Stowmarket, in Suffolk. No agreeable opening to life this for a young man with intellectual aspirations, and already ambitious of literary distinction. Far removed from books and lectures, to be chained to humble-in the eyes of the world, ignominious duties in a country town, from its size meriting the name of a village; to be ignored by all the educated inhabitants, save the prudent apothecary looking out for patients of all degrees; to be regarded by the well-to-do tradesmen (usually, in country towns, strongly enamoured of the respectability of the establishment) with suspicion as "the young dissenting fellow;" and to endure the magnificent patronage of little artizans, who paid an annual sum of 58. to their chapel, must have constituted a bitter experience to the ardent young minister, who confessed that from boyhood he was in the habit of mouthing out the words of Cowley:

What shall I do to be for ever known,

And make the age to come my own.

In 1782, after he had been for five years a Nonconformist preacher, he settled in London, and applied himself wholly to literature. His first work consisted of Six Sermons, which may have attracted attention at Stowmarket, but are certainly not of sufficient power to interest the world of our day. Soon after the publication of these not very felicitous

efforts, he obtained employment on the New Annual Register, an occupation that in all probability supplied him with the greater part of the little money he required for his subsistence.

Between 1782 and 1793 he made repeated but unsuccessful attempts to get the regard of the public by, to use his own words, "writing different things of obscure note, the names of which, though innocent, and in some degree useful, I am rather inclined to suppress.' Whatever these "different things" were, the author did not, at the time of penning them, think them deserving of obscurity, for many years after he had established himself in unquestionable notoriety he reflected on these early disappointments with no ordinary bitterness. "I had endeavoured," he candidly stated in the last years of his long life, "for ten years, and was as far from approaching my object as ever. Everything I wrote fell dead-born from the press. Very often I was disposed to quit the enterprise in despair. But still I felt ever and anon impelled to repeat my effort." But he was now to burst forth from obscurity, and become a by-word for astonishment and horror on the lips of simple men!

Aroused by the events of the French Revolution, and surrounded by men discussing with freedom, and perhaps licentious irreverence, the questions of politics and morals, that the state of European society naturally suggested to all fairly intelligent people, Godwin worked enthusiastically and honestly, writing his "Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influences on General Virtue and Happiness," a work which he believed was destined to produce great and lasting effects on the human race. It was published in 1793, and immediately gained the attention its author so much coveted, and in due time the condemnation it so richly deserved. At first, the originality of the views of the writer was the universal topic; no one, however opposed he might be to the sentiments, thought of questioning their being the

peculiar offspring of Godwin's productive mind, though on a careful examination, any student, tolerably well read in the European, and especially French, literature of the close of the last century, will find that there is scarcely a single speculation in "The Enquiry," which may not be traced to a writer previous to Godwin. But to do him justice it must be observed that, though his friends proclaimed him a fountain of new thought, he never advanced any especial claim to originality. Indeed, on one occasion, he wrote with a candour and an egotism, alike remarkable, and showing how barren he was of veneration for his great contemporaries, "Every author, at least for the last two thousand years, takes his hint from some suggestion afforded by an author that has gone before him, as Sterne has very humourously observed, and I do not pretend to be an exception to this rule."

The praise due to Godwin for his part in the "Political Justice," is for the calm temper, the patience, and philosophic courage with which he displays and supports the extreme views of the socialists. He had a sincere respect forhumanity, a perfect reliance on the mental powers of his race; as long as he was engaged with thinking, honestly, earnestly, and to the very best of his ability, he believed it was impossible to go astray. And in this confiding spirit, troubled only by occasional twinges of alarm at the conclusions at which he arrived, he advanced views calculated to hurl man from civilization, back into a state immeasureably worse than the lowest state of merely natural barbarity.

On marriage he made the following astounding remarks. "The evil of marriage, as it is practised in European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each other for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this?