companion whose mind reflects the beauties of nature, and who can
appreciate the great reflex of nature as transmitted through the human
mind in the glorious art of the world, may really be raised to the
ideal state where the sacrilege of love will be unknown. We know that
this great desire must have passed through Mary Wollstonecraft's mind
and prompted her to her eloquent appeal for the "vindication of the
rights of woman."

With Mary's improved prospects, for she fortunately lived in a time
when the strong emotions and realities of life brought many
influential people admiringly around her, she was able to pay a visit
to Paris in 1792. No one can doubt her interest in the terrible drama
there being enacted, and her courage was equal to the occasion; but
even this journey is brought up in disparagement of her, and this
partly owing to Godwin's naive remark in his diary, that "there is no
reason to doubt that if Fuseli had been disengaged at the period of
their acquaintance he would have been the man of her choice." As the
little _if_ is a very powerful word, of course this amounts to
nothing, and it is scarcely the province of a biographer to say what
might have taken place under other circumstances, and to criticise a
character from that standpoint. If Mary was attracted by Fuseli's
genius, and this would not have been surprising, and if she went to
Paris for change of scene and thought, she certainly only set a
sensible example. As it was, she had ample matter of interest in the
stirring scenes around her--she with a heart to feel the woes of all:
the miseries however real and terrible of the prince did not blind her
to those of the peasant; the cold and calculating torture of centuries
was not to be passed over because a maddened people, having gained for
a time the right of power by might, brought to judgment the
representatives, even then vacillating and treacherous, of ages of