to Mr.
Carlisle. At the same hour Mary Wollstonecraft was buried at old Saint
Pancras, the church where but a few short months before she had been
married. A monument was afterwards erected over her willow-shadowed
grave. It bore this inscription:--

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN,

AUTHOR OF

A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN.

BORN XVII. APRIL, MDCCLIX.

DIED X. SEPTEMBER, MDCCXCVII.

Many years later, when Godwin's body lay by her side, the quiet old
churchyard was ruined by the building of the Metropolitan and Midland
Railways. But there were those living who loved their memory too dearly
to allow their graves to be so ruthlessly disturbed. The remains of both
were removed by Sir Percy Shelley to Bournemouth where his mother, Mary
Godwin Shelley, was already laid. "There," Kegan Paul writes, "on a sunny
bank sloping to the west, among the rose-wreathed crosses of many who
have died in more orthodox beliefs, lie those who at least might each of
them have said,--

'Write me as one who loves his fellow-men.'"

Mary Wollstonecraft's death was followed by exhaustive discussion not
only of her work but of her character. The result was, as Dr. Beloe
affirms, "not very honorable to her fair fame as a woman, whatever it
might be to her reputation as an author." The following passage written
at this time shows the estimation in which she was held by a number of
her contemporaries:--

"She was a woman of strong intellect and of ungovernable passions.
To the latter, when once she had given the reins, she seems to have
yielded on all occasions with little scruple, and as little
delicacy. She appears in the strongest sense a voluptuary and
sensualist, but without refinement. We compassionate her errors,
and respect her talents; but our compassion is lessened by the
mischievous tendency of her doctrines and example; and our respect
is certainly not extended or improved by her exclaiming against
prejudices of some of the most dangerous of which she was herself
perpetually the victim, by her praises of virtue, the sanctity of
which she habitually violated, and by her pretences to philosophy,
whose real mysteries she did not understand, and the dignity of
which, in various instances, she sullied and disgraced."

It was to silence such base calumnies that Godwin wrote his Memoirs. This
was undoubtedly the wisest way to answer Mary's critics. As