h her, and as both had
independently demonstrated that marriage was a failure, they naturally
married; but she died a week after giving birth to a daughter--the
future Mrs. Shelley. The _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, on which
Mary Wollstonecraft's fame as an author almost wholly rests, is in some
ways a book nearly as faulty as it can be. It is not well written; it is
full of prejudices quite as wrong-headed as those it combats; it shows
very little knowledge either of human nature or of good society; and its
"niceness," to use the word in what was then its proper sense, often
goes near to the nasty. But its protest on the one hand against the
"proper" sentimentality of such English guides of female youth as Drs.
Fordyce and Gregory, on the other against the "improper" sentimentality
of Rousseau, is genuine and generous. Many of its positions and
contentions may be accepted unhesitatingly to-day by those who are by no
means enamoured of advanced womanhood; and Mary, as contrasted with most
of her rights-of-women followers, is curiously free from bumptiousness
and the general qualities of the virago. She had but ill luck in life,
and perhaps showed no very good judgment in letters, but she had neither
bad brains nor bad blood; and the references to her, long after her
death, by such men as Southey, show the charm which she exercised.

With Godwin also is very commonly connected Thomas Holcroft (or, as Lamb
always preferred to spell the name, "_Ould_craft"), a curiosity of
literature and a rather typical figure of the time. Holcroft was born in
London in December 1745, quite in the lowest ranks, and himself rose
from being stable-boy at Newmarket, through the generally democratic
trade of shoemaking, to quasi-literary positions as schoolmaster and
clerk, and then to the dignity of actor. He was about thirty-five when
he first began regular authorship; and during the rest of his life he
wrote four novels, some score and a half of plays, and divers other
works, none of which is so good as his Autobiography, published after
his death by Hazlitt, and said to be in part that writer's work. It
would have been fortunate for Holcroft if he had confined himself to
literature; for some of his plays, notably _The Road to Ruin_, brought
him in positively large sums of money, and his novels were fairly
popular. But he was a violent democrat,--some indeed attributed to him
the origination of most of the startling things in Godwin