There cannot perhaps be a properer place than the present, to state her principles upon this subject, such at least as they were when I knew her best.  She set a great value on a mutual affection between persons of an opposite sex.  She regarded it as the principal solace of human life.  It was her maxim, “that the imagination should awaken the senses, and not the senses the imagination.”  In other words, that whatever related to the gratification of the senses, ought to arise, in a human being of a pure mind, only as the consequence of an individual affection.  She regarded the manners and habits of the majority of our sex in that respect, with strong disapprobation.  She conceived that true virtue would prescribe the most entire celibacy, exclusively of affection, and the most perfect fidelity to that affection when it existed.—­There is no reason to doubt that, if Mr. Fuseli had been disengaged at the period of their acquaintance, he would have been the man of her choice.  As it was, she conceived it both practicable and eligible, to cultivate a distinguishing affection for him, and to foster it by the endearments of personal intercourse and a reciprocation of kindness, without departing in the smallest degree from the rules she prescribed to herself.

In September 1791, she removed from the house she occupied in George-street, to a large and commodious apartment in Store street, Bedford-square.  She began to think that she had been too rigid, in the laws of frugality and self-denial with which she set out in her literary career; and now added to the neatness and cleanliness which she had always scrupulously observed a certain degree of elegance, and those temperate indulgences in furniture and accommodation, from which a sound and uncorrupted taste never fails to derive pleasure.

It was in the month of November in the same year (1791), that the writer of this narrative was first in company with the person to whom it relates.  He dined with her at a friend’s, together with Mr. Thomas Paine and one or two other persons.  The invitation was of his own seeking, his object being to see the author of the Rights of Man, with whom he had never before conversed.

The interview was not fortunate.  Mary and myself parted, mutually displeased with each other.  I had not read her Rights of Woman.  I had barely looked into her Answer to Burke, and been displeased, as literary men are apt to be, with a few offences, against grammar and other minute points of composition.  I had therefore little curiosity to see Mrs. Wollstonecraft, and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine.  Paine, in his general habits, is no great talker; and, though he threw in occasionally some shrewd and striking remarks; the conversation lay principally between me and Mary.  I, of consequence, heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.