"[A]nd he who is not governed by reason should square his behaviour by an arbitrary standard; but by what rule your attack on Dr Price was regulated we have yet to learn."
— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Joseph Johnson
Date
December 1790
Metaphor
"[A]nd he who is not governed by reason should square his behaviour by an arbitrary standard; but by what rule your attack on Dr Price was regulated we have yet to learn."
Metaphor in Context
You have shewn, Sir, by your silence on these subjects, that your respect for rank has swallowed up the common feelings of humanity; you seem to consider the poor as only the live stock of an estate, the feather of hereditary nobility. When you had so little respect for the silent majority of misery, I am not surprised at your manner of treating an individual whose brow a mitre will never grace, and whose popularity may have wounded your vanity – for vanity is ever sore. Even in France, Sir, before the revolution, literary celebrity procured a man the treatment of a gentleman; but you are going back for your credentials of politeness to more distant times. – Gothic affability is the mode you think proper to adopt, the condescension of a Baron, not the civility of a liberal man. Politeness is, indeed, the only substitute for humanity; or what distinguishes the civilised man from the unlettered savage? and he who is not governed by reason should square his behaviour by an arbitrary standard; but by what rule your attack on Dr Price was regulated we have yet to learn.
(pp. 47-8)
(pp. 47-8)
Provenance
Reading
Citation
A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France. (London: Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1790).
2 entries in ESTC (1790). Anonymous, first edition appears in December of 1790 <ESTC>. Second edition, with MW's name on the cover, published December 14 <ESTC>
Reading The Vindications. eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001). [Based on the 2nd ed.] See also edition at the Online Library of Liberty <Link to OLL>.
2 entries in ESTC (1790). Anonymous, first edition appears in December of 1790 <ESTC>. Second edition, with MW's name on the cover, published December 14 <ESTC>
Reading The Vindications. eds. D. L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2001). [Based on the 2nd ed.] See also edition at the Online Library of Liberty <Link to OLL>.
Date of Entry
12/02/2009
