t of character; while its
defects of local colour and historical truth are glaring. But Godwin,
who was in so many ways a mirror of the new thought of the time, had
caught by anticipation something of its nascent spirit of romance. He is
altogether a rather puzzling person; and perhaps the truest explanation
of the puzzle, as well as certainly the most comfortable to the critic,
is that his genius and literary temperament were emphatically crude and
undeveloped, that he was a prophet rather than anything else, and that
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 wit