celebrated production, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Never did any author enter into a cause, with a more ardent desire to be
found, not a flourishing and empty declaimer, but an effectual champion.
She considered herself as standing forth in defence of one half of the
human species, labouring under a yoke which, through all the records of
time, had degraded them from the station of rational beings, and almost
sunk them to the level of the brutes. She saw indeed, that they were
often attempted to be held in silken fetters, and bribed into the love
of slavery; but the disguise and the treachery served only the more
fully to confirm her opposition. She regarded her sex, in the language
of Calista, as

"In every state of life the slaves of men:"

the rich as alternately under the despotism of a father, a brother, and
a husband; and the middling and the poorer classes shut out from the
acquisition of bread with independence, when they are not shut out from
the very means of an industrious subsistence. Such were the views she
entertained of the subject; and such the feelings with which she warmed
her mind.

The work is certainly a very bold and original production. The strength
and firmness with which the author repels the opinions of Rousseau, Dr.
Gregory, and Dr. James Fordyce, respecting the condition of women,
cannot but make a strong impression upon every ingenuous reader. The
public at large formed very different opinions respecting the character
of the performance. Many of the sentiments are undoubtedly of a rather
masculine description. The spirited and decisive way in which the author
explodes the system of gallantry, and the species of homage with which
the sex is usually treated, shocked the majority. Novelty produced a
sentiment in their mind, which they mistook for a sense of injustice.
The pretty, soft creatures that are so often to be found in the female
sex, and that class of men who believe they could not exist without such
pretty, soft creatures to resort to, were in arms against the author of
so heretical and blasphemous a doctrine. There are also, it must be
confessed, occasional passages of a stern and rugged feature,
incompatible with the true stamina of the writer's character. But, if
they did not belong to her fixed and permanent character, they belonged
to her character _pro tempore_; and what she thought, she scorned to
qualify.

Yet, along with this rigid, and somewhat amazonia