However, it is necessary to understand a situation or a character before we can be amused by it. And as nothing in life changes so fast as its surface, the author who gives most pains to the finish of this, is also the first to become obsolete. Fashions in manner and dress and speech are proverbially ephemeral, and except for those in whom the antiquarian taste has been somehow developed, they lose charm and even meaning in passing out of date. Heroes and heroines, whose coats and gowns, and courtesies and bows, are all behind the time, of whom the colloquial talk is a forgotten jargon, and the ceremony as strange as the ritual of a foreign religion, stand no chance in competition with the crowd of ladies and gentlemen who are daily turned out by contemporary novelists, wearing costumes and talking a language of which every fold and every phrase makes a claim upon the reader’s sympathy, and an item in the general index to the author’s meaning. Miss Burney’s personages, once so fashionable and so familiar, have grown strange now that a century has passed over their heads; and though underneath the disguise of their Old World costumes they are still fresh and human, this is a secret only to be discovered at the cost of more careful reading than the modern world is apt to give to novels. MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’ MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (GODWIN). 1759-1797. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (GODWIN). Mary Wollstonecraft was born, it is supposed, in Epping Forest, on the 27th of April, 1759. The unhappy circumstances of her childhood and youth are sufficiently sketched in the following extracts. In 1778 she obtained a position as companion to a widow in Bath, where she continued for two years. In 1780, while the family were residing in Enfield, her mother died, leaving six children: Edward, Mary, Everina, Eliza, James and Charles. The younger ones were all, at some period of their lives, indebted to Mary for sisterly encouragement and pecuniary aid, for which they do not appear to have been duly grateful.