regenerating mankind, and ready at any incentive to feel himself freed
from his part in the marriage ceremony. What prudent parents would
have countenanced such a visitor? And need there be much surprise at
the subsequent occurrences, and much discussion as to the right or
wrong in the case? How the actors in this drama played their
subsequent part on the stage of life; whether they did work which
fitted them to be considered worthy human beings remains to be
examined.

* * * * *

As no story or life begins with itself, so, more especially with this
of our heroine, we must recall the past, and at least know something
of her parents.

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the most remarkable and misunderstood
women of even her remarkable day, was born in April 1759, in or near
London, of parents of whose ancestors little is known. Her father, son
of a Spitalfields manufacturer, possessed an adequate fortune for his
position; her mother was of Irish family. They had six children, of
whom Mary was the second. Family misery, in her case as in many, seems
to have been the fountainhead of her genius. Her father, a
hot-tempered, dissipated man, unable to settle anywhere or to
anything, naturally proved a domestic tyrant. Her mother seems little
to have understood her daughter's disposition, and to have been
extremely harsh, harassed no doubt by the behaviour of her husband,
who frequently used personal violence on her as well as on his
children; this, doubtless, under the influence of drink.

Such being the childhood of Mary Wollstonecraft, it can be understood