164 Whitford will serve to suggest its typical line of attack. Godwin and "Monk" Lewis were alike condemned by T. J. Mathias both in The Pursuits of Literature and in The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames (1798). In the latter piece, the memory of Mary Wollstdnecraft, Godwin's wife, was ungen- erously maligned; her memoirs and posthumous works were described as "a convenient manual of speculative debauchery with the most select arguments for reducing it into practice." 19 She was no better treated by the Reverend Richard Polwhele in his imitation of the Pursuits, The Unseed Females (1798), where she and her friends are branded as A female band despising Nature's law! and again as "female Quixotes of the new philosophy," and she herself is pilloried in these lines: See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks, Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex; O'er humbled man assert the sovereign claim, And slight the timid blush of virgin fame. 20 M.G. Lewis was attacked by Mathias on the score of the lewd- ness in Ambrosio; or The Monk. At the hands of Lady Anne Hamilton, author of The Epics of the Ton, Lewis fared little better. She classed his book with Peregrine Pickle as light reading for women of fashion. On a similar charge of evil sensuousness, Tom Moore's poems are ranged beside Lewis' novel; the verses are inspired, the female satirist says, by the Muse who . . . with young Teius sung of am'rous blisses, With one eternal round of hugs and kisses. 21 19 The Shade of Alexander Pope on the Banks of the Thames. A satirical poem, with notes. Occasioned chiefly, but not wholly, by the residence of Henry Graltan ... a/ Twickenham, in November, 1798. 2ded. (London, 1799,) 44-53. 20 The Unsex'd Females: a Poem, addressed to the author of The Pursuits of Literature. (London, 1798), 13. 21 The Epics of the Ton: or, The Glories of the Great World: a Poem in Two
Books . . . (London, 1807), 7.
