he had the incoherencies and the inconsistencies almost inseparable from prophecy. Even if fate and metaphysical aid had not conjoined Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in the closest bond possible between man and woman, it would have been proper to mention their names together as authors. For as Godwin's "New Philosophy" was the boldest attempt made by any man of the time in print to overthrow received conventions of the relations of man to man, and incidentally of man to woman, so was his wife's _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ a complement of it in relation to the status of the other sex as such. She was rather hardly treated in her own time; Horace Walpole calling her, it is said (I have not verified the quotation), a "hyena in petticoats": it would be at least as just to call Lord Orford a baboon in breeches. And though of late years she has been made something of a heroine, it is to be feared that admiration has been directed rather to her crotchets than to her character. This last appears to have been as lovable as her hap was ill. The daughter of an Irishman of means, who squandered them and became a burden on his children; the sister of an attorney who was selfishly indifferent to his sisters--she had to fend for herself almost entirely. At one time she and her sisters kept school; then she was, thanks to the recommendation of Mr. Prior, a master at Eton, introduced as governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough; then, after doing hack-work for Johnson, the chief Liberal publisher of the period, she went to Paris, and unluckily fell in with a handsome scoundrel, Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier. She lived with him, he deserted her, and she nearly committed the suicide which was actually the fate of her unfortunate daughter by him, Fanny Imlay or Godwin. Only at the last had she a glimpse of happiness. Godwin, who had some weaknesses, but who was not a scoundrel, met her, and fell in love with her, and as both had independently demonstrated that marriage was a failure, they naturally married; but she died a week after giving birth to a daughter--the future Mrs. Shelley. The _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, on which Mary Wollstonecraft's fame as an author almost wholly rests, is in some ways a book nearly as faulty as it can be. It is not well written; it is full of prejudices quite as wrong-headed as those it combats; it shows very little knowledge either of human nature or of good society; and its "niceness," to use the word in what was then its proper sense, often goes near to the nasty. But its protest on the one hand against the "proper" sentimentality of such English guides of female youth as Drs. Fordyce and Gregory, on the other against the "improper" sentimentality of Rousseau, is genuine and generous. Many of its positions and contentions may be accepted unhesitatingly to-day by those who are by no means enamoured of advanced womanhood; and Mary, as contrasted with most