y library. We have had enough of new systems, and
the world a great deal too much already."

Walpole may be accepted as the typical Tory, and to all his party Mary
probably appeared as the "philosophizing serpent." She seems always to
have incurred his deepest scorn and wrath. He could not speak of her
without calling her names. A year or two later, when she had published
her book on the French Revolution, writing again to Hannah More, he thus
concludes his letter:--

"Adieu, thou excellent woman! thou reverse of that hyena in
petticoats, Mrs. Wollstonecraft, who to this day discharges her ink
and gall on Marie Antoinette, whose unparalleled sufferings have
not yet stanched that Alecto's blazing ferocity."

There was at least one man in London whose opinion was worth having who,
it is known, treated the book with indifference, and he, by a strange
caprice of fate, was William Godwin. It was at this time, when she was in
the fulness of her fame, that Mary first met him. She was dining at
Johnson's with Paine and Shovet, and Godwin had come purposely to meet
the American philosopher and to hear him talk. But Paine was at best a
silent man; and Mary, it seems, monopolized the conversation. Godwin was
disappointed, and consequently the impression she made upon him was not
pleasing. He afterwards wrote an account of this first meeting, which is
interesting because of the closer relationship to which an acquaintance
so unpropitiously begun was to lead.

"The interview was not fortunate," he says. "Mary and myself parted
mutually displeased with each other. I had not read her 'Rights of
Women.' I had barely looked into her answer to Burke, and been
displeased, as literary men are apt to be, with a few offences
against grammar and other minute points of composition. I had
therefore little curiosity to see Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and a very
great curiosity to see Thomas Paine. Paine, in his general habits,
is no great talker; and, though he threw in occasionally some
shrewd and striking remarks, the conversation lay principally
between me and Mary. I, of consequence, heard her very frequently
when I wished to hear Paine.

"We touched on a considerable variety of topics and particularly on
the character and habits of certain eminent men. Mary, as has
already been observed, had acquired, in a very blamable degree, the
practice of