protests; instead of telling women how they are most likely to avoid censure and win praise, to gain a reputation for decorum and propriety of behaviour, she tells them to leave appearances out of consideration: "Make the heart clean, give the head employment," and behaviour will take care of itself. Dr. Gregory's remarks relative to reputation and the applause of the world, she complains, begin at the wrong end, because he treats them as ends in themselves, and not in their proper relative position as advantages usually, but by no means universally, attendant on nobility of character and purpose. How much sounder than Dr. Gregory's petty maxims, she reminds her readers, is the scriptural injunction, "Get wisdom, get understanding; forget it not; . . . forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee; love her, and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting get understanding." With a touch of humour, more common in her private letters than in her more studied works, Mary Wollstonecraft expresses her conviction that there is really no cause to counsel women to pretend to be sillier and more ignorant than they are. "When a woman has sufficient sense not to pretend to anything which she does not understand in some degree, there is no need of determining to hide her talents under a bushel. Let things take their natural course, and all will be well."
In combating false views concerning what women ought to be, and to what ends their lives should be directed, Mary Wollstonecraft did not con-
