III.

"Your best, your sweetest empire is to please."

The manners of men have their educational influence. The quiet turning-aside from women when matters of business, politics, or science are discussed; the common saying, "What have women to do with that? let them mind their knitting, or their house affairs;" the short answer when an interested question is asked, "You wouldn't understand it, if I told you,"—all these depress and enervate, and, even if notspoken, the spirit of them animates all social life. "Men are suspicious," wrote Dr. Alexander in 1790,"that a rational education would open the eyes of women, and prompt them to assert the rights of which they have always been deprived." But education could not be withheld nor eyes closed for ever; therefore the time has come to claim these rights. The Sorbonne is already asked why it confers degrees upon women with one hand, while it quietly locks Margaret Fuller out of Arago's lecture-room with the other. Need we inquire what influence it would have upon society, if all literature and scientific opportunities, if all societies devoted to natural history and mathematics, if all colleges and public libraries the world over, were thrown open to woman?

In inferior circles, where no leading minds preside, it would be as it is now: there would be much idle prating, much foolish delay, much inconsequent discussion; but woman is quick to recognize genius, to listen when wisdom speaks. She chatters, to be sure, in the presence of fools; but, when earnest men come to know the value of her enthusiasm, they will never be willing to lose it. When the great door of the scholarly and scientific retreat is once thrown open, you will be surprised to see the crowd ready to enter; and, when the sexes kindle into intellectual life together, many a woman's coals will be modestly laid upon an honored altar, and the flames will rise all the higher because they have been so fed.

How can we estimate sufficiently the corrupting influence of the newspapers of the land?

We may hope your prejudices will defend womanhere, and you will acknowledge that the minds cannot be kept pure before whom their details are set. Let us go farther, and say that they cannot be kept pure, coming in contact as they do with minds among men that gloat over such records. God is just, and his compensations are terrible. If you do not spare the purity of the lowest in the land, you cannot save that of your wife and daughter. If you will not protect the vulgar against themselves, you cannot protect the refined against the vulgar. He is not a pure man, who, among his fellows, thinks a thought or utters a word he would blush to have his sister hear. She is not a pure woman, who, in the seclusion of her chamber, or gossip with her household, omits one of the proprieties which delicacy requires. She has no title toourrespect, who is not secure inher own. How can we reach such a standard as this, if we invite pollution daily across our threshold, and call it harmless because it dresses in printer's ink? It is not enough that much of the obscenity is pure invention. The profit of the scandal overbalances the cost of the libel. The simplest item is turned to gross account. Even the intimation that the postmaster has placed a woman at the ladies' window in New York has to be coupled with the insinuation that she would have "done better at the gentlemen's." What business have you or I with details that concern only judge and jury? What good does it do society to quote high legal authority upon "flirtation," unless, indeed, we learn thereby to estimate aright the corruptingpower of the first wrong step? Police reports, vulgar anecdotes, shocking accidents, and trivial gossip a child might be ashamed to repeat, make up the mass of our daily sheets. Happy is the editor who offers three columns of common sense daily to his readers. When, alas! shall we have a public willing to pay for common sense and pure reading alone?

A woman ought to turn like a flash of light from a foul page, a coarse and vulgar word. No wit should ever tempt her to read the one, or repeat the other; and what I say of woman, Imeanof man. I have not two separate moral standards for the sexes.

Margaret Fuller speaks somewhere of certain habits of impure speech which she had heard attributed to ladies in a New-York hotel. What foundation that story had, we may never find; but all of us know some women before whom we keep the coldest reserve, and with whom we would never touch many a subject we should be willing to discuss with any pure-minded man. Ladies! Not all the gold of Pactolus, not all the beauty of Anadyomene, not all the wisdom of Minerva, could make such womenladies! We cannot redeem the poor denizens of Five Points till we have redeemed those of the Fifth Avenue.

Our own children must prattle oaths, if we will not hush the drunken brawler in the streets.

Note.—When this lecture was first delivered, in 1858, it excited more discussion than any "revolutionary notions" of which I have ever been suspected. Since then, the same ideas, as applied to other questions, have been expressed in various quarters. I think a thorough classical education necessary to a college bred man. As far as I have any opinions to express,they coincide with those recently uttered by John Stuart Mill at St. Andrew's.I wish to sustain the remarks of the text by the following quotations:—"Many things with the Greeks and Romans most venerable have not merely lost their sanctity in our eyes, but present contemptible and even ludicrous ideas to us. Hence, any allusion to them, or any expression of the feelings connected with them, or even a reference to the habits of thinking which those feelings have produced, must have an operation most unpropitious."—Lord Brougham."The fictions constituting the epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, and their imitators, so far from being consonant with the taste and sense of modern readers, are, on the contrary, often annoying, from the absence of all moral or poetical justice."—"The gods who preside in this scenic exhibition are tainted with every vice which has since degraded their supposed subordinates of the human race. Cruelty, revenge, deceit, hatred, unrelenting rancor, and unbridled lust, are the qualities which call for approval in a generation professing to feel and practise virtues of an opposite nature. An exterminating war is undertaken for the sake of a vacillating adulteress, and its heroes quarrel implacably about the possession of their female slaves. Ulysses, on his return home, winds up the 'Odyssey' by a wholesale slaughter of his disorganized subjects, hangs up a dozen censurable females in a row, and puts Melanthius to a lingering death by gradual mutilation."—"In their social relations, the Greeks were licentious and exquisitely depraved. In their domestic habits, they were primitive, destitute, and uncleanly."—Dr. Jacob Bigelow.These words represent the re-action of Christian morality against the abuses of classical study, to which I allude in my text. But let the classics be taught properly, and morality will have no complaint to make. We cannot understand the history of the world, without an intelligent investigation of its beginnings; but we should be carefully protected against assuming, as reasonable and proper, either the habits and opinions or the sarcasms of an extinct experience.

I wish to sustain the remarks of the text by the following quotations:—

"Many things with the Greeks and Romans most venerable have not merely lost their sanctity in our eyes, but present contemptible and even ludicrous ideas to us. Hence, any allusion to them, or any expression of the feelings connected with them, or even a reference to the habits of thinking which those feelings have produced, must have an operation most unpropitious."—Lord Brougham.

"The fictions constituting the epic poetry of Homer, Virgil, and their imitators, so far from being consonant with the taste and sense of modern readers, are, on the contrary, often annoying, from the absence of all moral or poetical justice."—"The gods who preside in this scenic exhibition are tainted with every vice which has since degraded their supposed subordinates of the human race. Cruelty, revenge, deceit, hatred, unrelenting rancor, and unbridled lust, are the qualities which call for approval in a generation professing to feel and practise virtues of an opposite nature. An exterminating war is undertaken for the sake of a vacillating adulteress, and its heroes quarrel implacably about the possession of their female slaves. Ulysses, on his return home, winds up the 'Odyssey' by a wholesale slaughter of his disorganized subjects, hangs up a dozen censurable females in a row, and puts Melanthius to a lingering death by gradual mutilation."—"In their social relations, the Greeks were licentious and exquisitely depraved. In their domestic habits, they were primitive, destitute, and uncleanly."—Dr. Jacob Bigelow.

These words represent the re-action of Christian morality against the abuses of classical study, to which I allude in my text. But let the classics be taught properly, and morality will have no complaint to make. We cannot understand the history of the world, without an intelligent investigation of its beginnings; but we should be carefully protected against assuming, as reasonable and proper, either the habits and opinions or the sarcasms of an extinct experience.

THE MEANING OF THE LIVES THAT HAVE MODIFIEDPUBLIC OPINION.

"Speak! or I go no further.I need a goal, an aim. I cannot toil,Because the steps are here; in their ascent,Tell meThe End, or I sit still and weep."Naturliche Tochter.

WE have considered the controlling influence exercised by consolidated public opinion concerning women. We have asked from what sources this opinion was derived. We have now to consider some individual lives which have set it at defiance, and in that way done something towards its reconstruction.

Mary Wollstonecraft is chiefly known in this country as the wife of Godwin, and the author of a "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." This book is often accused of the most irreligious and libertine tendencies; and, for many years, her name stood in my own mind as the representative of an unfortunate woman of genius, unbalanced in character, and only to be remembered by the obstacles she had laid in the path of her sex. I turned instinctively from the idea I had somehow conceived of her; nor was it till a singular literary fact, the exponent of her individual power, arrested my attention, that I was tempted to take up the "Rights of Woman."

In making a rapid survey of English literature, to ascertain how many women had made a decisive mark upon it, and how many works had been published especially bearing upon woman's advancement, I at first experienced a bitter disappointment. Upon approaching the year 1800, however, I found a stream of literature rushing in, for which I could not account. It united many rivulets of thought and life. Some volumes were heavy and oppressive in a double sense; some were light as pamphlets; some consisted of translations from other languages; some were biographies; many were attempts at reconstruction on a rotten foundation; others, an attempt at the rebuilding of society from its very base. But these works all bore the same stamp, an impress powerful, but healthy. It seemed as if one thought had animated all these workers who had taken society by surprise; for the prejudice and bigotry they must have aroused had left no corresponding trace. The prefaces generally began, "On account of the interest lately excited," "The public mind seeming now to be interested;" and I read very few volumes before I discovered that the power which had aroused and interested was no other than Mary Wollstonecraft's "Rights of Woman."

These books ranged onward from 1790, and the force of the influence was not spent for twenty years. Among them, I recall, at this moment, Dr. Alexander's "History of Women" in two quarto volumes; Matilda Betham's "Biographical Dictionary," anhonest, if nota valuable, attempt to supply a want still felt in English literature; and Cotton's translation of the mathematical works of Maria Agnesi. These were born of a common mother. I read the "Vindication," therefore, with persistent care; looking with fruitless question for the second and third volumes that were promised. Could this be the book which had been so abused for half a century? The American edition had been published before garbling became the fashion; but I took pains to collate it carefully with the English. It was all in vain. I found only a simple, determined, eloquent plea for a proper education for women, urged on social, moral, and religious grounds; an earnest protest against Rousseau and Dr. Gregory; and a demand thatmenshould be subject to the same moral laws as women. Very revolutionary this! Reprint it, under modern sponsorship, and you would find it perhaps too heavy to read. It would only repeat what you all know, and you would miss the fanatical spice of our later speech. Yet this book was so much needed when it appeared, that it acted on the under-current of English thought and life like a subsoil plough, and brought all manner of abominations to the surface. The preface alone contains any allusion to woman's political rights. If is dedicated to Talleyrand, who, in publishing a pamphlet on national education, had admitted the inconsistency of debarring women from their exercise. From this preface, theworldtook fright, andwemay judge in what manner she intendedto follow up her plea for education. Let me quote a few passages. "I earnestly wish," she says, "to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consist. I wish to persuade women to acquire strength both of mind and body, and to convince them, that the soft phrases, 'susceptibility of heart,' 'delicacy of sentiment,' and 'refinement of taste,' are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt."—"An air of fashion is but a badge of slavery."—"It follows," she says farther on, "that women should either be shut up, like Eastern princesses, or educated in such a manner as to think and act for themselves."—"Suppose a woman trained to obedience, married to a sensible man, who directs her judgment, without permitting her to feel the servility of her position. She cannot ensure the life of her protector. He may die, and leave her at the head of a large family."—"It is notempire, butequality, woman should contend for. When women are sufficiently enlightened to discover their real interests, they will be very ready to resign all those prerogatives of lovewhich are not mutualfor the calm satisfactions of friendship and the tender confidence of habitual esteem. Before marriage, they will not assume any insolent airs, nor afterwards abjectly submit; but, endeavoring to act like reasonable creatures in both relations, they will not be tumbled from a throne to a stool."

This is the character of the whole book. It contains nothing more subversive of morality than these words. You cannot do better than read it, and receive, as I did, a lasting lesson on the folly of prejudice. As a work of art, it is irregular in method, and impulsive in execution; facts not to be wondered at, since it was written and printed in the brief space of six weeks. Dr. Channing once wrote of her: "I have lately read Mary Wollstonecraft's posthumous works. Her letters towards the close of the first volume are the best I ever read. They are superior to Sterne's. I consider her the greatest woman of the age. Her 'Rights of Woman' is a masculine performance, and ought to be studied by her sex; the sentiments are noble and generous."

What, then, was the character of the woman? Was it as strong and generous as the sentiments she advocated? Her life broke down some social barriers, and, though noble and heroic when viewed from within, looks hampered and unsatisfactory from the common stand-point. Godwin has erected an exquisite monument to her memory, in a sketch written soon after her decease. Mary Wollstonecraft was born near London in the year 1759. She came into an unhappy and uncongenial home. Her father was a passionate tyrant; her mother, compelled to submit to his caprice, became like every other slave, a tyrant where she had the power, and ruled her children with a rod of iron. By defending her mother from her husband's violence, Mary early extortedsome degree of affection from the one, and respect from the other. Her father had some property, which he seems to have squandered by frequent changes of abode; and a day school at Beverley, in Yorkshire, gave her her principal advantages of education. An eccentric clergyman at Hoxton, named Clare, added some farther instruction. Under his roof, she formed an intimacy with Frances Blood, destined to influence her whole life. This girl was remarkably accomplished, and, at the age of eighteen, supported her father and mother and their family of younger children. She was delicately neat and proper in all she did; and her influence was of the greatest benefit to Mary, who had often desired to assist her family, but was deterred by the helpless condition of her mother. She now went as companion to a family at Bath, but soon relinquished the position, on account of her mother's serious illness. Mrs. Wollstonecraft was exacting and troublesome. Mary nursed her with devoted care, but, after her death, bade a final farewell to her father's roof. His affairs had become wretchedly involved; and, with Fanny Blood and her two sisters, she proceeded to open a day school. At first, she had looked upon Fanny as her superior, but her own force of character soon found its rightful position. The health of her friend broke down under her unnatural burden, and Mary's devotion to her for years was beautiful to see. Her marriage and removal to Lisbon, in a vain search for health, soon put this devotion to the test.

At this point, Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation was unsullied. She was an admirable manager, an efficient and successful teacher; yet, when Fannie became seriously ill, she did not hesitate to risk her only means of support, the prosperity of her school, to go to her. Her friend, Dr. Price, the Unitarian minister, and Mrs. Burgh, were annoyed at what they considered a quixotic devotion; but they supplied her with money, and she went. A few days closed in death an intimacy of more than ten years, which had been, until this time, Mary's tenderest interest in life. On her way home, her moral energy saved the lives of a French crew in a sailing vessel which she encountered, just about to founder. Her school had suffered by her absence; and the pressing necessities of Fanny's family, in which she still took an interest, induced her to have recourse to literature. The first ten pounds received from her "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters" went to their relief. Nothing can be sadder than to see a young girl placed as Mary Wollstonecraft now was,—compelled to fulfil the duties of a father and mother to younger brothers and sisters. The position is unnatural. Gratitude might be expected, but envy is more often felt. The personal advantages sought for their sakes, and not to be transferred except as a pecuniary profit, she is supposed to seek for her own. Affection partly yields, and enthusiasm does not replace it; while she is urged by necessities which make it difficult to bear the errors and intractabilities of those she is providingfor. Still loving, and desiring to provide for her sisters, Mary thought it better to live apart from them, and accepted a temporary position as governess in Lord Kingsborough's family. When they left England, she went to Bristol, and published a novel, which, founded on her ten years of friendly devotion, took the highest rank as a work of sentiment. The next three years were spent in her own house, in London, in the active service of the publisher, Johnson. She translated from French, German, and Italian, wrote several books for children, and took a large share in the conduct of the "Analytical Review."

Her translation of Salzman's "Elements of Morality" led to an interesting correspondence with its author, who repaid the service, subsequently, by translating into German her "Rights of Woman." These occupations, if they did little towards the discipline of her powers, served to rouse her from the dejection into which the death of her friend had plunged her. Her earnings were now devoted to her own family. One sister she kept at Paris for two years to qualify her as a governess; another she placed as parlor-boarder at a London school. Her brother James she sent to Woolwich; afterward procuring for him a position in the navy, where he soon rose to be a lieutenant. Her favorite, Charles, she placed with a farmer for instruction; and then fitted him out for America, where he grew wealthy on the basis she provided. This brother must have left alarge family in the State of New York. Her brothers and sisters thus established, she attempted to rescue a support for her father from his broken and confused fortunes. This proving impossible, he was supported by her own labor, until his death. The very great demands made upon her by such natural obligations did not prevent her from assuming others. She adopted for her own the child of a dead friend, the niece of John Hunter. Her brilliancy, her personal beauty, her unselfish devotion, could not fail to win for her many loving friends; and among them the French Revolution found her. The work which first gave her her proper literary rank was her answer to Burke's Reflections upon that movement. She wrote rapidly: her pamphlet was the first of the many that appeared, and obtained extraordinary success. The public applause warmed her, and her next production was her celebrated "Vindication of the Rights of Woman." The startling energy with which she exploded the system of gallantry, a miserable relic of the Stuart courts, roused the popular indignation. It was hard to reconcile the vigor of her rebuke to the tender sentiment which trembled through the book, and also to the impression produced by Mary herself, lovely in person, and, in the most engaging sense, feminine in her manners. Her intimacy with the historical painter, Fuseli, followed. He was a man of powerful genius and strong prejudices. His influence upon Mary, if it was sometimes refreshing, could not always have been beneficial. The readerof Haydon's Autobiography will remember this man. A wider knowledge of the world would have protected her from his influence: as it was, she pursued the intimacy with unsuspecting delight; for Fuseli was a contented husband, and his wife was her friend. She was now in her thirty-second year; she had arrived at a period when domestic happiness of some sort becomes essential to the strongest woman. The fullest-fruited laurel then withers before her eyes, if it has not taken root at her own hearth. At the close of the year 1792, Mary took refuge in Paris from the chagrin and restlessness which began to oppress her. Her years of toil had left her sad and lonely: she needed to rest for a little while in human affection. She could not even write to her own satisfaction; for her morbid fatigue led her to reproduce Fuseli's cynicism, and she dared not trust herself. She entered the best circles of Parisian society, and became intimate with the leaders of the Revolution. In four months after her arrival occurred the most untoward event of her life,—her marriage to a worthless American named Gilbert Imlay; a name rescued from oblivion only by his temporary attachment to her. I say hermarriage, for Imlay offered himself in marriage, and was accepted as a husband; but, taking advantage of a custom not unusual at Paris in those disorderly times, Mary refused to consummate the legal forms. Mr. Imlay had no property. Mary had a large family to support; and she neither wished to become answerable forhis debts, nor to make him responsible for hers. She took the name of Imlay; and, expecting to follow her brother to America, she obtained from our ambassador at Paris a certificate of American citizenship, to serve as a temporary protection. In order that you may comprehend the precise significance which this step had in that place and at that time, let me remind you, that Helen Maria Williams, her personal friend, and the ward of Dr. Rees of cyclopedic memory, was married in the same way to a Mr. Edwards, then in Paris. She was a well-known writer of that period; and we are still indebted to her for some of the best hymns sung in our churches,—among them, that well-known hymn, beginning, "While thee I seek, protecting Power." But her husband was worthy of the trust she had reposed in him, and she never turned a ready pen against the follies of society: sohercharacter has never stood in the public stocks.

It will be impossible to consider Mary's attachment to Imlay in any degree rational, if we look only at hercharacter, and keep out of sight her peculiar personalhistory.

The dawdling inefficiency and brutal temper of her father had disgusted her alike with "men of spirit" and "men of straw." In her husband, she saw, as she thought, a certain democratic manliness; and his daring speculations seemed to be inspired by courage and genius. The affections which had been roused by her admiring intercourse with Fuseli kindled gladly on this new shrine, where no social duty, norstern sense of personal honor, contended against her warming fancy. For the first time in her life, she found herself happy; and happiness gave her back the beauty of early youth. She was playful, gentle, sympathetic. Her eyes had new brightness, her cheeks new color, and the bewitching tenderness of her smile fascinated the very women who approached her. She had been married eighteen months, her love braving all the trials that must have come, when Imlay left her for London. She had expected his quick return; but delay followed delay, and Mary passed a year with a new-born child, learning, by slow and painful degrees, that she had trusted this man beyond his worth. At last, he sent for her to London, where his misconduct affected her mind to such an extent, that she twice attempted her own life, and was rescued the second time with difficulty. As soon as she recovered from the fever which had induced delirium, her native strength told her what she ought to do. Imlay had business in Norway, which required a confidential and judicious agent. She determined to take this upon herself; and hoped, by absence and success, to regain the affection she had lost. The man was, in no sense, worthy of her. On her return, she tried, for the sake of their child, to remain in the same house with him. It was not possible; and, very soon, a final separation took place. It would have taken place long before, but that Imlay was a man who could not wholly escape from a fascination he had once felt. After he became involved inlow connections, he could never re-enter her presence, without resuming, for the time, the sympathetic delicacy befitting her lover. During all this time, Mary had occupied herself with literary work. She never spoke of Imlay, and would allow no one to blame him in her presence. Conscious of her own upright intentions, it must have been no small mortification to find her insight and generosity baffled. She felt that she was herself to blame for having placed an impulsive man in a position to which he was wholly unequal. She was everywhere received and treated as a married woman, and lost none of the respect and affection she had well deserved. In April, 1797, she was married to Godwin, the author of "St. Leon;" and this marriage deprived her of two new friends, whom she held very dear. Godwin was so artless, that he imagined his wife's social position would be improved by an honorable marriage; but it obliged Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Siddons to admit that the nature of her marriage to Imlay allowed her to take her divorce into her own hands.

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 wordsof 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 attachmentfor Fuseli; that she formed another, ofthe 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.

To understand the strength of the prejudice against Mary Wollstonecraft, you should see that from all the autobiographies of the period her name is excluded; as if the friends of those who had been intimate with her while living, would not permit the association of names after death. I have said, that, until her marriage to Godwin, she kept her place in English society; and women of the most sensitive propriety, such as Mrs. Siddons and Mrs. Inchbald, admitted her to their intimacy. How, then, did such a prejudice grow up? It was probably forming in the popular mind while she was happy in the affection of her friends; and, the moment they found it conventionally needful to sacrifice her, the outbreak was unrestrained. In the first place, she was an ardent republican; athing no less antagonistic to English feeling in her day, than we have seen it prove in ours. In the second, she was a Unitarian; and Unitarians were radicals in politics as well as in religion. In the third place, being a republican, and a resident of Paris in its troubled times, she was supposed to share the disorder of its morals; an impression which her attempted suicides no doubt confirmed.

We shall not share in this country in any prejudice which republicanism or Unitarianism excited. We are, I trust, ready to admit that an attempt at suicide could only come with delirium, for which she would be as free from responsibility as for a typhoid fever or an Asiatic cholera. What we have to do, then, is to understand her relation to the laws of marriage, and to see how far her second marriage can be justified. When she met Imlay at Paris, I do not think she had ever considered the social bearing of these laws, except so far as her mother's experience had pained her. That experience made her willing to do what other women about her were doing, with no bad result that she could see, to keep herself free from pecuniary entanglement. In one way, this was prudent; in an other way, it was extremely imprudent; and the imprudence touched a more vital point than the prudence: but that it was never considered criminal by wise and candid judges, that she was never compromised in any relation up to this, the intimacies we have recorded prove. Had she been a weak,immoralwoman, she would have continued to live withImlay for her child's sake, but availing herself of the shelter of a connection from which she recoiled. At this moment, she wrote to her husband, "Your reputation shall not suffer. I shall never have a confidant. I am content with the approbation of my own mind; and, if there be a Searcher of hearts, mine will not be rejected." And again: "My child may have reason to blush for her mother's want of prudence; but she shall never despise me." These are not the words of a weak or irreligious woman. So far, then, all was well, except that society had no efficient outlawry for the man who had deserted her. She still occasionally met him, but bore the unexpected trial, when it came, with dignity and sweetness. When Godwin sought her in marriage, he knew, of course, that no legal ties bound her. Mary saw no harm in using the liberty that remained to her. "Why could she not have remained single?" said the world; but had the world been so just and kind to her, that we could expect her to resist the influence of a generous and courageous love? Had she lived in this country, and been divorced by the laws of Indiana, society would have been silent; but the real evil would have been the same.

"Never did there exist a woman," said her husband, "who might with less fear expose her actions, and call upon the universe to judge them." I believe this to be true so far as her own relations were concerned; and I believe, that, by her second marriage, she meant to exercise a right of protest againstexisting laws, which two of the most gifted children of the nineteenth century have exercised again in our own time with emphasis. It requires a philosophic mind to see the relation of the individual to the state: heroic, indeed, is the spirit which, perceiving it, braves the common expectation by a defiant life. On the other hand, it is by no prejudice that we demand this account of each person's private affairs. It is a demand born of an ill-defined, dimly entertained, but still a just idea of the relations of God, the family, and the state. I ought not to say so much, without adding that no one in this country can adequately judge of the pressure of the marriage laws as they still exist in England. What is resisted, is, in most instances, what no American woman would be expected to bear; but for England, as for this country, I rest in the confident hope that a right adjustment of woman's relation to society will change healthfully all existing legislation. Such legislation as that of Indiana does not seem to me an advance, although it may have been demanded by anadvancingpublic sentiment.

I have said this honestly, with a tender pity in my heart, to clear the memory of a much-abused woman. Does any one ask me if I would justify the position in which she stood? I answer, frankly, No. We do not live to ourselves alone; and if we are ever tempted to take a step against the moral convictions of the world, believing that we can do as we will with our own, one would think the possibility that childrenmay be born to inherit the obloquy we excite, without themselves deserving it, would be enough to deter any right-minded woman. No love or care, or abject self-sacrifice, can reconcile a child to the stain of illegitimacy. "What does the Lord thy God require of thee?"—"To do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly." It is not walking humbly to set up our own conception of fitness against the accumulated experience of mankind. Still farther: It is of very little importance what others may think of us, when we are acting conscientiously; but what we think of others, our own mood of mind towards God and man,—that is of the very greatest.

The influence of the "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was greatly aided by the efforts of Mr. Day, and of Maria Edgeworth, whose literary career began about the time of its publication. Following closely upon these, and so nearly parallel in effort, and equal in varied ability, that we hardly know in what order to name them, are Lady Morgan, Harriet Martineau, and Mrs. Jameson. Sydney Morgan, sitting alone at the age of fourscore in her tiny house at Dublin, filled like a museum with the accumulation of her years of travel, projecting the publication of her last work, was lately, like Mrs. Somerville at Florence, a pensioner of Queen Victoria. But, from the hour of her first appearance as the author of the "Wild Irish Girl," she has exercised a generous womanly influence. Under the disguise of novels, books of travel, and the like, she has published an immensenumber of volumes, filled with information which may be a little too crowded for convenience, but always accurate, always original, and, for the most part, received from historic sources, in personal intercourse. Her warm hatred of tyranny made friends for her, wherever she went. When a young girl, she took up the cause of her own country with a vehemence which won the liberal party, and made her fashionable before she was approved. "The wild Irish girl" and her harp were essential to the success of every entertainment; and invitations lay two or three deep for every evening. She entered society with beauty, wit, and prestige. She might have done what she would. She chose to remain faithful to unpopular opinions. After her marriage to Sir Charles Morgan, they went, for economical reasons, to the Continent, where they eventually spent many years. In France, Lafayette, Ségur, Dénon, and L'Aguisseau were her intimate friends; and in thesalonof the Princess de Salm she was always a welcome guest. In Germany, Flanders, and Italy, not only the liberal youth, but the learned eld, crowded her apartments, gave her minute information, and became devoted cicerones. The friendship of cardinals and princes did not dim her natural democracy of view; and her last words were as true to liberty as her first. Her works on France and Italy were proscribed in both countries; yet "Young France" and "Young Italy" contrived to obtain and read them. She came into fashion in Paris whenever the Bourbons went out;and, when she dined with Rothschild, his famous cook acknowledged her friendship for the people in autographs of spun sugar! "We shall meet at the breakfast of the Austrian ambassador," said a Parisian fop, as he made his bow. "Not we," she laughed in answer: "it would be as much as his place is worth to ask me." Wherever she went, and whatever she did, her ears were always open to a woman's name; and, with the most loyal interest, she gathered up every thing relating to their lives, their influence, and their disabilities. What she was told as gossip, was retained, studied out, and digested, before, with the piquancy of a French woman and the warmth of an Irish, it was given to the world. The first two volumes of her "History of Woman" do not touch a period of universal interest; but, had she been able to complete the work, it would have exhausted the subject. In the Béguine, she says: "Women meddle with politics as well as tent-stitch, and, like Madame de Maintenon, bring their work-bags to the Privy Council, and direct the affairs of Europe while they trace patterns for footstools. The influence of woman will ever be exercised directly or indirectly in all good or evil. It is a part of the scheme of nature. Give her, then, such light as she is capable of receiving. Educate her, whatever her station, for taking her part in society. Her ignorance has often made her interference fatal; her knowledge, never." The cordial sympathy of her husband has made Lady Morgan's life beautiful. His legalknowledge and antiquarian taste added their own charm to whatever she undertook.

How great and worthy is the literary position of Harriet Martineau, we all know. Its retro-actionary influence in favor of the ability and freedom of her sex is what we are to indicate here. For whatever immediate purpose she writes, her words bear indirectly on the widest womanly emancipation. May this remark stimulate your curiosity, and keep you on the alert for pregnant sentences! Such sentences tell more of the progress of human thought than some of us suspect: they indicate its natural, habitual poise. "Women especially," she writes, "should be allowed the free use of whatever strength their Maker has seen fit to give them. It is essential to the virtue of society, that they should be allowed the freest moral action, unfettered by ignorance, and unintimidated by authority; for it is an unquestioned and unquestionable fact, that, if women were not weak, men would not be wicked, and that, if women were bravely pure, there would be an end of the dastardly tyranny of licentiousness." This passage will have all the more power over observant readers, because it occurs unexpectedly, and marks the opportunity seized to speak a necessary if unwelcome truth.

What noble service Mrs. Jameson rendered in the field of art or letters did not leave her indifferent to the interests of her sex. She was placed in circumstances to make her see quickly and feeldeeply all that relates to womanly position and development. An early martyr to the prejudices of society; married, I think at sixteen, to a man far beyond her own rank in life, who left her at the altar,—she bore the title of wife, and led the life of a celibate: but her first word for her sex was as strong and true as her last, while her own path lay between lines of living fire. Only lately did we hear of her as a lecturer and reformer; but, nearly thirty years ago, we might have cut from her pages the following words: "We are told openly by moralists and politicians, that it is for the general good of society, nay, an absolute necessity, that one-fifth part of the female sex should be condemned as the legitimate prey of the other, predoomed to die in reprobation in the streets, in hospitals, that the virtue of the rest may be preserved, and the pride and the passions of men both satisfied. But I have a bitter pleasure in thinking, that this most base and cruel conventional law is avenged upon those who made and uphold it; that here the sacrifice of a certain number of one sex to the permitted license of the other is no general good, but a general curse, a very ulcer in the bosom of society." Can you guess how brave and pure a woman was needed to write those words? All the indirect tendency of her works is in keeping with them; and we recognize the same voice, as she said in a later lecture:—

"When female nurses were to be sent to the Crimea, there was to be met the mockery of thelight-minded, the atrocious innuendoes of the dissolute, the sneers of the ignorant, and the scepticism of the cold. I have seen men who deem it quite a natural and proper thing that women—some womenat least—should lead the life of a courtesan, put on a look of offended propriety at the idea of a woman nursing a sick soldier. I have seen men—ay, and women too—who deem it a matter of course that our streets should be haunted by contagious vice, disgusted at the idea of women turning apothecaries andhôpitalières. And, worse than all, I have heard men—and women too—who acknowledge the gospel of Christ, who call themselves by his name, who believe in his mission of mercy, disputing about the exact shade of orthodoxy in a woman who had offered up every faculty of her being at the feet of the Redeemer."[10]

Remember that these words were spoken where they belonged, in the very heart of Belgravia, to the very people who deserved them, and respect the brave purity which compelled lips as well as pen to utterance. It would scarce be honest not to say, in this connection, that Mrs. Jameson took some pains, so long as she lived, to separate herself from the American Woman's-Rights party—a party, it may be, only represented to her by the vulgar pretension of travelling Bloomers. Some of us take comfort in remembering how much more easily the misrepresentationsof the press, or the intrusions of unfit subjects on womanly discussion, will float across the wide Atlantic, than our weightier works. When she said, in the same breath, concerning a decree of the French Consulate, "I confess, I should like to see a decree ofourParliament beginning with a recognition that women do exist as a part of the community, whose responsibilities are to be acknowledged, and whose capabilities are to be made available, not separately, but conjointly with those of men," we know that she worked for us and with us, and forgive the want of recognition in gratitude for the real service.

Mrs. Gaskell has perhaps done more than any woman of this century, not confessedly devoted to our cause, to elevate the condition of her sex, and disseminate liberal ideas as to their needs and culture. The first part of her career was one of those brilliant successes which startle us into surprise and admiration. It was checked midway by the publication of her life of Charlotte Bronté, the best and noblest of her works. Checked, because condemned in that instance without a hearing, she could never afterwards feel the elastic pleasure which was natural to her in composing and printing; and, for three long years afterwards, never touched her pen. I would not allude to this subject, if every notice of her, since her death, had not done so; repeating the old censure, as a matter of course. Here in America, we exculpate her. The public was wrong, in the first place, inasmuch as it has come to demand biography beforebiography is possible. The publisher was wrong, in the second; for he ought to have known, and could easily have ascertained, how plain a statement the English law would permit. The public was still further wrong, when it attributed misapprehension and carelessness to a woman whom it very well knew to be incapable of either. I, for one, shall never forgive nor forget the officious censure given by one who must have known that the legal apology tendered, in Mrs. Gaskell's absence, to protect her pecuniary interests, had the unfortunate effect to put her in a position where explanation and self-defence were alike impossible. Mrs. Gaskell had deserved the steady confidence of the public.

I have kept till the last the name of Fredrika Bremer, whose good fortune it was to secure lasting benefits to her sex. God sent to her early years dark trials and privations. Her father's tyrannical hand crushed all power and loveliness out of her life. At first, she rebelled against her sufferings; but, when he died in her girlhood, she was able to see that they lent strength to her efforts for her sex. It was the rumor of what we are doing in this country for women that first drew her hither. It is not the fashion for Miss Bremer's friends fully to recognize her position in this respect. I owe my own convictions on the subject of suffrage to the reflections she awakened. When I told her that my mind was undecided on this point, she showed her disappointment so plainly, that I was forced to reconsider the whole subject. MissBremer did not hurry her work: she had a serene confidence that she should be permitted to finish what she had begun. She secured popularity by her cheerful humor, her genuine feeling, her true appreciation of men, and her insight into the conditions of family happiness, before she made any direct appeal against existing laws. Those who will read her novels thoughtfully, however, will see that she was, from the first, intent upon making such an effort possible. From the beginning, she pleaded for the social independence of wives; asked for them a separate purse; showed that woman could not even give her love freely, until she was independent of him to whom she owed it. To a just state of society, to noble family relations, entire freedom is essential.

Under her influence, females had been admitted to the Musical Academy. The directors of the Industrial School at Stockholm had attempted to form a class, and Professor Quarnstromm had opened his classes at the Academy of Fine Arts to women. Cheered by her sympathy, a female surgeon had sustained herself in Stockholm; and Bishop Argardh indorsed the darkest picture she had ever drawn, when he pleaded with the state to establish a girls'-school. It was at this juncture that Miss Bremer published "Hertha." This book was a direct blow aimed at the laws of Sweden concerning women. By this time, she had herself become, in Sweden, what we might fitly call a "crowned head." She was everywhere treated with distinction; and her sudden appearance in any placewas greeted with the enthusiasm usually shown by such nations only to their princes. She said of her new book, "I have poured into it more of my heart and life than into any thing which I have ever written;" and verily she had her reward. She was at Rome, two years after,—in 1858,—when the glad news reached her, that King Oscar, at the opening of the Diet, had proposed a bill entitling women to hold independent property at the age of twenty-five. All Sweden had read the book which moved the heart of the king; and the assembled representatives rent the air with their acclamations.

In the following spring, the old University town of Upsala, where her friend Bergfalk occupies a chair, granted theright of suffrageto fifty women owning real estate, and to thirty-one doing business on their own account. The representative whom their votes went to elect was to sit in the House of Burgesses. Miss Bremer was not ashamed to shed happy tears when this news reached her. If she had ever reproached Providence with the bitter sorrow of her early years, she was penitent and grateful now. Then was fulfilled the prophecy which she had uttered, as she left our shores, "The nation which was first among Scandinavians to liberate its slaves, shall also be the first to emancipate its women."

This is not the place to unfold the delicate sheaths of meaning with which flower-like Robert Browning invests his thought; but the man who wrote the "Blot on the Scutcheon," and the exquisite sketchof "Pippa Passes," has done such justice to the sex, and so far helped the cause of right feeling and right thinking in respect to some of the most delicate problems that concern it, that we are compelled to speak of him gratefully. His marriage, too, is still fragrant; a full-fruited flower of promise to the world, which makes us see the best things possible, and believe that the time is coming when man and woman will not seldom stand before the altar as equal and individual, yet sacredly one. To Elizabeth Browning, to whom was given in her life that place of pre-eminence among women which Shakespere must always hold among men, we owe grateful thanks, for the scholarly achievement, the conscientious study, the womanly zeal, which distinguished all her work. When theology sometimes wrestled with poetry in her speech, we translated it into a freer tongue, and thanked her all the same. In "Aurora Leigh" she stabbed every conventional falsity to the heart, and held the ear tenaciously till she had delivered all her oracle.

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