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and our life is, as it were, bound up in the object of our attachment.

It was worse when I recollected my wife and my children. When I considered for the first time that they were now in a manner nothing to me, I felt a sensation that might be said to mount to anguish. How can a man attach himself to any thing, when he comes to consider it as the mere plaything and amusement of the moment! In this statement, however, I am not accurate. Habit is more potent than any theoretical speculation. Past times had attached me deeply, irrevocably, to all the members of my family. But I felt that I should survive them all. They would die one by one, and leave me alone. I should drop into their graves the still renewing tear of anguish. In that tomb would my heart be buried. Never, never, through the countless ages of eternity, should I form another attachment. In the happy age of delusion, happy and auspicious at least to the cultivation of the passions, when I felt that I also was a mortal, I was capable of a community of sentiments and a going forth of the heart. But how could I, an immortal, hope ever hereafter to feel a serious, an elevating and expansive passion for the ephemeron of an hour!

St. Leon, a Tale of the Sixteenth Century,

P. 262, 1. 3. Substract. This form, though now regarded as a vulgarism, was once common in good writers, and has the authority of the Fr. soustraire, though not of the Lat. subtrahere.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759.
She was
forty years old when she married Godwin, and she
died within the year. Her earlier history was ro-
mantic and unfortunate. As a novelist, as a poli-
tician, and, above all, as a defender of the rights of
women and of unconventional views of marriage,
she obtained a considerable reputation in the excited
period of the French Revolution.

WOMAN'S TRUE POSITION.

LET woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues

of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that claims such a weak being to her duty. If the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips; a present which a father should always make to his son-in-law on his wedding day, that a husband may keep his whole family in order by the same means; and without any violation of justice reign, wielding this sceptre, sole master of his house, because he is the only being in it who has reason :the divine, indefeasible earthly sovereignty breathed into man by the Maker of the universe. Allowing this position, women have not any inherent rights to claim; and by the same rule, their duties vanish, for rights and duties are inseparable.

Be just then, O ye men of understanding! and mark not more severely what women do amiss than the vicious tricks of the horse or the ass for whom ye provide provender-and allow her the privileges of ignorance, to whom ye deny the rights of reason, or ye will be worse than Egyptian task-masters, expecting virtues where nature has not given understanding.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

L. 3. Claim to is not now used, “claim” having lost the simple sense of " call." But" reclaim to" would not seem strange even now.

WILLIAM COBBETT

William Cobbett, the raciest of all English political writers, was born in 1762. He was a soldier, a farmer, and a man of letters, a kind of Radical and a kind of Tory, a thinker of much shrewd sense and much absurd prejudice. He died in 1835. The directness and vigour of his expression are delightful.

THE WICKED BOROUGH-MONGERS.

AND, then, think of the tithes ! I have talked to several

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farmers here about the tithes in England; and, they laugh. They sometimes almost make me angry; for they seem, at last, not to believe what I say, when I tell them, that the English farmer gives, and is compelled to give, the parson a tenth part of his whole crop, and of his fruit and milk and eggs and calves and lambs and pigs and wool and honey. They cannot believe this. They treat it as a sort of romance. I sometimes, God forgive me! almost wish them to be farmers in England. I said to a neighbour the other day, in half anger : I wish your farm were at Botley. There is a fellow there, who would soon let you know, that your fine apple trees do not belong to you. He would have his nose in your sheep-fold, your calf-pens, your milk-pail, your sow's bed, if not in the sow herself. Your daughters would have no occasion to hunt out the hen's nests : he would do that for them." And then I gave him a proof of an English parson's vigilance by telling him the story of Baker's peeping out the name, marked on the sack, which the old woman was wearing as a petticoat. To another of my neigh

bours, who is very proud of the circumstance of his grandfather having been an Englishman, as, indeed, most of the Americans are, who are descended from Englishmen ; to this neighbour I was telling the story about the poor woman at Holly Hill, who had nearly dipped her rushes once too often. He is a very grave and religious man. He looked very seriously at me, and said, that falsehood was falsehood, whether in jest or earnest. But, when I invited him to come to my house, and told him, that I would show him the acts which the borough-villains had made to put us in jail if we made our own soap and candles, he was quite astounded. "What!" said he, "and is old England really come to this! Is the land of our forefathers brought to this state of abject slavery! Well, Mr. Cobbett, I confess, that I was always for King George, during our Revolutionary war; but, I believe, all was for the best; for, if I had had my wishes, he might have treated us as he now treats the people of England." "He," said I, "it is not he; he, poor man, does nothing to the people, and never has done anything to the people. He has no power more than you have. None of his family have any. All put together, they have not a thousandth part so much as I have; for I am able, though here, to annoy our tyrants, to make them less easy than they would be; but, these tyrants care no more for the Royal Family than they do for so many posts or logs of wood." And then I explained to him who and what the borough-mongers were, and how they oppressed us and the king too. I told him how they disposed of the church livings, and, in short, explained to him all their arts and all their cruelties. He was exceedingly shocked; but was glad, at any rate, to know the truth.

Letter to the People of Botley.

P. 266, I. 4. The story turns on the fact that rushlights could be made without interference by the Excise, but candles could not. An exciseman, probably in joke, had told the woman that if she had given her rushes one dip more she must have gone to jail.

ANNE RADCLIFFE.

Anne Ward, who married a journalist named Radcliffe, was born in London in 1764, and died there in 1823. Her famous novels, once extolled to the skies, then ridiculed, now respected but little read, were all published in less than ten years, and she never wrote herself out. They show real power, marred chiefly by prolixity, and by repetition of dubious means of imbressing.

EMILY'S MIDNIGHT ADVENTURE.

DURING the remainder of the day, Emily's mind was agi

tated with doubts and fears and contrary determinations, on the subject of meeting this Barnardine on the rampart, and submitting herself to his guidance, she scarcely knew whither. Pity for her aunt, and anxiety for herself, alternately swayed her determination, and night came, before she had decided upon her conduct. She heard the castle clock strike eleven-twelveand yet her mind wavered. The time, however, was now come, when she could hesitate no longer and then the interest she felt for her aunt overcame other considerations, and, bidding Annette follow her to the outer door of the vaulted gallery, and there await her return, she descended from her chamber. The castle was perfectly still, and the great hall, where so lately she had witnessed a scene of dreadful contention, now returned only the whispering footsteps of the two solitary figures gliding fearfully between the pillars, and gleamed only to the feeble lamp they carried. Emily, deceived by the long shadows of the pillars, and by the catching lights between, often stopped, imagining she saw some person moving in the distant obscurity of

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