ATTEMPTED SUICIDE.

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roof. It was then that, driven to despair, and for a time quite out of her mind, she attempted to drown herself by leaping from Putney Bridge; and when that attempt was frustrated, although she was quite insensible when taken out of the water, she still nursed for some time the desire of ending her existence. The letters written during this period are some of the most terrible and most touching ever penned. But calmer counsels, and the loving care of her friends, among whom Mr Johnson was chief, prevailed. She determined once again to support herself by her pen, and resented all attempts of Imlay to induce) her to accept support from him. "I want not such vulgar comfort," she says, "nor will I accept it. I never wanted but your heart: that gone, you have nothing more to give. Forgive me, if I say that I shall consider any direct or indirect attempt to supply my necessities as an insult I have not merited, and as rather done out of tenderness for your own reputation than for me." With regard to Fanny's maintenance, she neither accepted nor refused anything. "You must do as you please with regard to the child," was her final decision. Imlay eventually gave a bond for a sum to be settled on his child, the interest to be devoted to her maintenance; but neither principal nor interest was ever paid.

The following letter to Mr Rowan was written just after the final parting with Imlay.

Mary Wollstonecraft to A. Hamilton Rowan, Esq.

"LONDON, 26th Jany., 1796.

"MY DEAR SIR,—Though I have not heard from you, I should have written to you, convinced of your friendship, could I have told you anything of myself that could have afforded you pleasure. I am unhappy. I have been treated with unkindness, and even

cruelty, by the person from whom I had every reason to expect affection. I write to you with an agitated hand. I cannot be more explicit. I value your good opinion, and you know how to feel for me. I looked for something like happiness in the discharge of my relative duties, and the heart on which I leaned has pierced mine to the quick. I have not been used well, and I live but for my child; for I am weary of myself. I still think of settling in France, because I wish to leave my little girl there. I have been very ill, have taken some desperate steps; but I am now writing for independence. I wish I had no other evil to complain of than the necessity of providing for myself and my child. Do not mistake me. Mr Imlay would be glad to supply all my pecuniary wants; but unless he returns to himself, I would perish first. Pardon the incoherence of my style. I have put off writing to you from time to time, because I could not write calmly. Pray write to me. I will not fail, I was going to say, when I have anything good to tell you. But for me there is nothing good in store --my heart is broken!-I am yours, &c. MARY IMLAY."

Still, for the sake of the child, bearing Imlay's name, she began again to enter into London literary society, in which she and Godwin were almost equally conspicuous.

CHAPTER IX.

MARRIED life. 1797.

THE fragmentary notes which Mrs Shelley left, in reference to her mother, are all full of very peculiar interest. They serve to manifest not only the sympathy, partly intellectual, partly physical, felt by the gifted daughter for the still more gifted mother, who died in giving her birth, but also the estimate in which that mother was held by Godwin and by such friends as Mrs Reveley, from whom Mrs Shelley learned all that she knew of her dead mother. Some of these notes are too incomplete for quotation, mere drafts and hints of sentences, which might afterwards be finished; but one, more entire, may here be given, describing the estimate which she had been led to form of Mary Wollstonecraft at the time of her marriage.

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once perhaps in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud. Her genius was undeniable. She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and the oppressed, an earnest desire was kindled within her to diminish these sorrows. Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed them with a tender charm that enchants while it enlightens. She was one whom all loved who had ever seen her. Many years are passed since that beating heart

has been laid in the cold still grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without enthusiastic veneration. Did she witness an act of injustice, she boldly came forward to point it out, and induce its reparation. Was there discord among friends or relatives, she stood by the weaker party, and by her earnest appeals and kindliness awoke latent affection, and healed all wounds. 'Open as day to melting charity,' with a heart brimful of generous affection, yearning for sympathy, she had fallen on evil days, and her life had been one course of hardship, poverty, lonely struggle, and bitter disappointment.

"Godwin met her at the moment when she was deeply depressed by the ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence; who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and thoughtless generosity, and lofty independence of character, to plunge her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly difficulties, indeed, she set at nought, compared with her despair of good, her confidence betrayed, and when once she could conquer the misery that clung to her heart, she struggled cheerfully to meet the poverty that was her inheritance, and to do her duty by her darling child. It was at this time that Godwin again met her, at the house of her friend Miss Hayes," having before done so occasionally before she went to Norway.

But

Godwin's first impression of her was not a pleasing one. He wished to hear Tom Paine talk, who was also of the party, and always a silent man, and he considered that Mrs Imlay talked too much. He was also an extremely fastidious critic, and had been offended at some slight verbal inaccuracies, as they seemed to him, in her earlier works. after reading the letters from Norway, his views about her culture were wholly altered. He saw that the blemishes, if indeed they had really existed, were but superficial, and he speedily yielded to the charm which all that knew her recognised. His own exquisitely written description of their love is published in the Memoirs of his wife, but a

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passage may here be extracted from a book which now is scarce, and but little known. He says,

"The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest, and most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil spreader or the prey, in the affair. When, in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose to the other. ... There was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love."

The description of their married happiness is equally striking. The slight clouds which will appear in the correspondence which passed between them, were of an extremely transient character, and arose from Mary Wollstonecraft's extreme sensitiveness and eager quickness of temper, which were perhaps now and then tried by Godwin's confirmed bachelor habits, and also by the fact that he took au pied de la lettre all that she said about the independence of women, when in truth she leant a good deal on the aid of others. Into one plan of Godwin's, which may seem strange, his wife willingly fell. His strong view on the possibility that families may easily weary of the society of their different members, led him to take rooms in a house about twenty doors from that in the Polygon, Somers Town, which was their joint home. To this study he repaired as soon as he rose in the morning, rarely even breakfasting at the Polygon, and here also he often slept. Each was engaged in his and her own literary occupations, and they seldom met, unless they walked together, till dinner time each day.