of her works, although one may object that for a novel the moral purpose is far too obvious, the manner too generalised, and many of the situations revolting to the taste of a modern reader. But, with all its faults, it is a production that, in the implacable truth with which it lays open the festering sores of society, in the unshrinking courage with which it drags into the light of day the wrongs the feeble have to suffer at the hands of the strong, in the fiery enthusiasm with which it lifts up its voice for the voiceless outcasts, may be said to resemble Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo.
The other contents of these four volumes are: a series of lessons in spelling and reading, which, because prepared especially for her child, Fanny Imlay, are an interesting relic; the "Letter on the French Nation," mentioned in a previous chapter; a fragment and list of proposed "Letters on the Management of Infants"; several letters to Mr. Johnson, the most important of which have already been referred to; the "Cave of Fancy," an Oriental tale, as Godwin calls it,—the story of an old philosopher who lives in a desolate sea-coast district and there seeks to educate a child, saved from a shipwreck, by means of the spirits under his command (the few chapters Godwin thought proper to print were written in 1787, and then put aside, never to be finished); an "Essay on Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature," a short discussion of the difference between the poetry of the ancients, who recorded their own impressions from nature, and that of the moderns, who are too apt to express sentiments borrowed from books; and finally, to conclude the list of contents, the book contains some "Hints" which were to have been incorporated in the second part of the Rights of Women which Mary intended to write. These fragments and works are intrinsically of small value.
