Wonderful inconsistency of society, which, having interpreted truly her upright nature through years of desertion, now condemned her,--whether for her first wrong step, for assuming her own divorce, or for loving a man of undoubted probity, who could tell? A short year of undisturbed happiness followed, when the birth of their only child--the late Mrs. Shelley--suddenly put an end to her life. A beautiful memorial survives her, in these words of her husband. "This light," he says, "was lent me for a very little while, and it is now extinguished for ever. The strength of Mary's mind lay in her intuition. In a robust and unwavering judgment of this sort, there is a kind of witchcraft. When it decides justly, it produces a responsive vibration in every ingenuous mind. In this sense, my oscillation and scepticism were often fixed by her boldness." I am very well aware how much courage is required of any woman who shall seem to defend Mary Godwin from the popular conception of her. I know that the woman should herself be spotless who would attempt to rectify that conception, yet two circumstances seem to compel explanation. In the first place, there is no question, that if the views of woman which are now beginning to move society originated with her scholarly, republican friend, Mrs. Catharine Macaulay, yet the fire and eloquence of Mary's own words were needed to give them currency. Society has been just so far as this, that it has identified her with the subject of "Woman's Rights;" and all of us who are carried forward by a momentum which she imparted, must desire to understand the nature of the impulse which controls us. In the second place, Godwin's short Life of her has been long out of print, and has now become very rare; and I have not been able to find a single encyclopædia or biographical dictionary which gives the facts correctly. Turn to them, and you will find that Mary Wollstonecraft had a criminal but fruitless attachment for Fuseli; that she formed another, of _the same kind_, for an American, who deserted her. I brand these statements as malicious falsehoods, carelessly repeated now that they have been long exploded: and, as I write these statements, the tears rush to my eyes; for where are the descendants of the brothers and sisters whom she reared? where are the kindred of Fannie Blood and John Hunter, whose lives her generous efforts gladdened? Nay, might not one man of the drowning crew she forced the captain of her ship to rescue, speak a noble word in her behalf? I have narrated her life with some detail, for you must understand the facts upon which you pass judgment; and these details are many of them gathered from private sources.