The Vindication of the Rights of Woman is undoubtedly a very unequal performance, and eminently deficient in method and arrangement.  When tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary composition, it can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the first class of human productions.  But when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures.  The publication of this book forms an epocha in the subject to which it belongs; and Mary Wollstonecraft will perhaps hereafter be found to have performed more substantial service for the cause of her sex, than all the other writers, male or female, that ever felt themselves animated in the behalf of oppressed and injured beauty.

The censure of the liberal critic as to the defects of this performance, will be changed into astonishment, when I tell him, that a work of this inestimable moment, was begun, carried on, and finished in the state in which it now appears, in a period of no more than six weeks.

It is necessary here that I should resume the subject of the friendship that subsisted between Mary and Mr. Fuseli, which proved the source of the most memorable events in her subsequent history.  He is a native of the republic of Switzerland, but has spent the principal part of his life in the island of Great-Britain.  The eminence of his genius can scarcely be disputed; it has indeed received the testimony which is the least to be suspected, that of some of the most considerable of his contemporary artists.  He has one of the most striking characteristics of genius, a daring, as well as persevering, spirit of adventure.  The work in which he is at present engaged, a series of pictures for the illustration of Milton, upon a very large scale, and produced solely upon the incitement of his own mind, is a proof of this, if indeed his whole life had not sufficiently proved it.

Mr. Fuseli is one of Mr. Johnson’s oldest friends, and was at this time in the habit of visiting him two or three times a week.  Mary, one of whose strongest characteristics was the exquisite sensations of pleasure she felt from the associations of visible objects, had hitherto never been acquainted, or never intimately acquainted, with an eminent painter.  The being thus introduced therefore to the society of Mr. Fuseli, was a high gratification to her; while he found in Mary, a person perhaps more susceptible of the emotions painting is calculated to excite, than any other with whom he ever conversed.  Painting, and subjects closely connected with painting, were their almost constant topics of conversation; and they found them inexhaustible.  It cannot be doubted, but that this was a species of exercise very conducive to the improvement of Mary’s mind.