Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/101

Rh the children under their care as they think best. The religious tone of the Stories is even more pronounced than that of the Education of Daughters.

The book is, on the whole, well written, and was popular enough in its day, and, to make it still more attractive, Mr. Johnson engaged Blake, whom he was then befriending, to illustrate it.

Of the several translations Mary made at this period, but the briefest mention is necesssary [sic]. It often happens that the book translated is in a great degree indicative of the mental calibre of its translator; but Mary's case was entirely different. The choice of foreign works rendered into English was not hers, but Mr. Johnson's. By adhering to it she was simply fulfilling the contract she had entered into with him, and there were times when she had but a poor opinion of the books he put into her hands. There was at least one book the translation of which must have been a pleasure to her. This was the Rev. C. G. Salzmann's Elements of Morality, for the use of Children. Its object, like that of the Original Stories, was to teach the young, by practical illustration, why virtue is good, why vice is evil.

Mary never pretended to produce perfectly literal translations. Her version of Lavater's Physiognomy, now unknown, was but an abridgment. She purposely "naturalized" the Elements of Morality, she explains, in order not to "puzzle children by pointing out modifications of manners, when the grand principles of morality were to be fixed on a broad basis." She made free with the originals that they might better suit English readers, and this she frankly confesses in her prefaces. Her translations are, in consequence,