Containing many passages that are winningly piquant and innocently charming; affording abundant evidence that their writer’s affections were strongly concerned in this wretched _liaison_; betraying no few indications of a spirit almost to be styled high-mindedness; yielding superabundant evidence of the writer’s cleverness and brilliancy, these letters are not the letters of a refined woman, or the letters of a woman who considers herself the wife of the man to whom they are addressed. Still less are they the letters of a woman who feels herself secure of her position. Had she been a woman of nice refinement, she could not have written so lightly and copiously as she does of matters that a gentlewoman of refinement tells only to her physician, her nurse, her closest female friends, and shrinks from naming to her husband. Had she been the woman of singular refinement we are asked to believe her, she would have been less communicative to her correspondent about her health. Regard for the feelings of my readers forbids me to speak, even in the most guarded terms, of the more disagreeable details of these too circumstantial communications. In this respect, the letters are just such letters as, in the absence of positive testimony, the author of the _Rights of Woman_ might be imagined to have written to the man, with whom she was living in Free Love. Instead of being the letters of a woman who considers herself a wife, she does not venture, even in her confidential communications to Imlay, to style herself his wife, whilst hinting how strongly she wished to be privileged to do so. Instead of being the letters of a woman ‘feeling herself secure of her position,’ nothing in them is more striking and pathetic than the evidence how painfully aware she was, that she held her admirer by only the slenderest thread. Mr. Kegan Paul says that she believed Gilbert Imlay’s love would endure. What a strange belief for a woman who thought no man’s love capable of endurance; who wrote in the _Rights of Woman_ that ‘love, from its nature, must be transitory,’ and was ‘perhaps the most evanescent of all passions;’ who had taught in the same book that every woman should anticipate the _inevitable_ death of her husband’s love for her! Anyhow, ere the first four of the seventy-seven letters to Imlay had been written, she knew him to have been a fickle lover:-- ‘I have found out,’ she wrote from Paris to Imlay at Havre, in September, 1793, in the fourth of the long series of letters, ‘that I have more mind than you, in one respect: because I can, without any violent effort of reason, find food for love in the same object, much longer than you can. The way to my senses is through my heart; but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a short cut to yours.’