Now, I am told that an unmarried woman with a babe at her breast is not received in England into the best society.  The tale of Mary’s misfortune had preceded her, and literary London laughed a hoarse, guttural guffaw, and society tittered to think how this woman who had written so smartly had tried some of her own medicine and found it bitter.  Publishers no longer wanted her work, old friends failed to recognize her, and one man to whom she applied for work brought a rebuke upon his head, that lasted him for years.

Godwin, philosopher, idealist, enthusiast and reformer, who made it his rule to seek out those in trouble, found her and told a needless lie by declaring he had been commissioned by a certain nameless publisher to get her to write certain articles about this and that.  Then he emptied his pockets of all the small change he had, as an advance payment, and he hadn’t very much, and started out to find the publisher who would buy the prospective “hot stuff.”  Fortunately he succeeded.

After a few weeks, Mr. Godwin, bachelor, aged forty, found himself very much in love with Mary Wollstonecraft and her baby.  Her absolute purity of purpose, her frankness, honesty and high ideals surpassed anything he had ever dreamed of finding incarnated in woman.  He became her sincere lover; and she, the discarded, the forsaken, reciprocated; for it seems that the tendrils of affection, ruthlessly uprooted, cling to the first object that presents itself.

And so they were married; yes, these two who had so generously repudiated the marriage-tie were married March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, at Old Saint Pancras Church, for they had come to the sane conclusion that to affront society was not wise.

On August Thirtieth, in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, was born to them a daughter.  Then the mother died—­died did brave Mary Wollstonecraft, and left behind a girl baby one week old.  And it was this baby, grown to womanhood, who became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

* * * * *

William Godwin wrote one great book:  “Political Justice.”  It is a work so high and noble in its outlook that only a Utopia could ever realize its ideals.  When men are everywhere willing to give to other men all the rights they demand for themselves, and co-operation takes the place of competition, then will Godwin’s philosophy be not too great and good for daily food.  Among the many who read his book and thought they saw in it the portent of a diviner day was one Percy Bysshe Shelley.

And so it came to pass that about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, this Percy Bysshe Shelley called on Godwin, who was living in a rusty, musty tenement in Somerstown.  The young man was twenty:  tall and slender, with as handsome a face as was ever given to mortal.  The face was pale as marble:  the features almost feminine in their delicacy:  thin lips, straight nose, good teeth, abundant, curling hair, and eyes so dreamy and sorrowful that women on the street would often turn and follow the “angel soul garbed in human form.”