Page:Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885).djvu/136

120 written and published. It is dated Feb. 15, 1793, so that the opinions therein expressed were not hastily formed. As its style is that of a familiar letter, and as it gives a good idea of the thoroughness with which she had applied herself to her task, it may appropriately be quoted from here. She writes:—

The whole mode of life here tends indeed to render the people frivolous, and, to borrow their favourite epithet, amiable. Ever on the wing, they are always sipping the sparkling joy on the brim of the cup, leaving satiety in the bottom for those who venture to drink deep. On all sides they trip along, buoyed up by animal spirits, and seemingly so void of care that often, when I am walking on the Boulevards, it occurs to me that they alone understand the full import of the term leisure; and they trifle their time away with such an air of contentment, I know not how to wish them wiser at the expense of gaiety. They play before me like motes in a sunbeam, enjoying the passing ray; whilst an English head, searching for more solid happiness, loses in the analysis of pleasure the volatile sweets of the moment. Their chief enjoyment, it is true, rises from vanity; but it is not the vanity that engenders vexation of spirit: on the contrary, it lightens the heavy burden of life, which reason too often weighs, merely to shift from one shoulder to the other

Before I came to France, I cherished, you know, an opinion that strong virtues might exist with the polished manners produced by the progress of civilisation; and I even anticipated the epoch, when, in the course of improvement, men would labour to become virtuous, without being goaded on by misery. But now the perspective of the golden age, fading before the attentive eye of observation, almost eludes my sight; and, losing thus in part my theory of a more perfect state, start not, my friend, if I bring forward an opinion which, at the first glance, seems to be levelled against the existence of God! I am not become an atheist, I assure you, by residing at Paris; yet I begin to fear that vice or, if you will, evil is the grand mobile of action, and that, when the passions are justly poised, we become harmless, and in the same proportion useless

You may think it too soon to form an opinion of the future government, yet it is impossible to avoid hazarding some conjectures, when everything whispers me that names, not principles, are changed, and when I see that the turn of the tide has left the dregs of the old system to corrupt the new. For the same pride of office, the same