place with the "Speech for Unlicensed Printing," the "Essay on Education," and "Emile," among the unseen levers which have moved the changes of the times. PAUL, C. KEGAN, 1876, William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries, vol. I, p. 105.

I thought of Shelley-so we all think of him-as a man of extraordinary sensitiveness and susceptibility, susceptibility above all to ideal impressions; and I further thought of him as instinctively craving something to balance his own excessive sensitiveness, something to control his mobility of feeling, something to steady his advance and give him poise. A law he needed, but a law which should steady his advance, not one which should trammel his advance or hold him in motionless equilibrium. Coming at a time when the ideas of the Revolution were in the air, he found what served him as a law in those ideas, as declared by their most eminent English spokesman, William Godwin. A lyrical nature attempting to steady its advance by the revolutionary abstractions such was Shelley. And his work in literature represents on the one hand his own mobile temperament, his extraordinary sensitiveness and marvellous imagination, and on the other hand the zeit-geist, the spirit of 1789, as formulated by Godwin in a code of morals, rigid, passionless, and doctrinaire, yet containing a hidden fire, and glowing inwardly with ardent anticipations.. The volumes of "Political Justice" were thus for Shelley at once a law and a gospel.-DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1887, Last Words on Shelley, Fortnightly Review, vol. 48, p. 461.

Shows a great advance in lucidity and command of logical language. He has been compared, surely to his own moral advantage, with Condorcet; but there is no question that he was curiously related to the French precursors of the Revolution, and particularly to Rousseau and Helvetius, from whom he caught, with their republican ardour, not a little of the clear merit of their style.-GOSSE, EDMUND, 1897, A Short History of Modern English Literature, p. 293.

CALEB WILLIAMS

1794

One word respecting the MS. itself, and I have done. The incidents are ill chosen;

the characters unnatural, distorted; the phraseology intended to mark the humorous ones inappropriate; the style uncouth; everything upon stilts; the whole uninteresting; written as a man would make a chair or a table that had never handled a tool. I got through it, but it was as I get over a piece of ploughed-up ground, with labour and toil. By the way, judging from the work in question, one might suppose some minds not to be unlike a piece of ground. Having produced a rich crop, it must lie fallow for a season, that it may gain sufficient vigour for a new crop. You were speaking for a motto for this workthe best motto in my opinion would be a Hic jacet; for depend upon it, the world will suppose you to be exhausted; or rather what a few only think at present, will become a general opinion, that the Hercules you have fathered is not of your begetting. MARSHAL, JAMES, 1793, Letter to Godwin, May 31; William Godwin by Paul, vol. 1, p. 90.

In the writings of Godwin, some of the strongest of our feelings are most forcibly awakened, and there are few novels which display more powerful painting, or excite higher interest, than his "Caleb Williams.” The character of Falkland, the chief actor, which is formed on visionary principles of honour, is perhaps not strictly an invention, as it closely resembles that of Shamont, in Beaumont and Fletcher's "Nice Valour." But the accumulated wretchedness with which he is overwhelmed, the inscrutable mystery by which he is surrounded, and the frightful persecutions to which he subjects the suspected possessor of his dreadful secret, are peculiar to the author, and are represented with a force. which has not been surpassed in the finest passages and scenes of poetic or dramatic fiction.-DUNLOP, JOHN, 1814-42, The History of Fiction, vol. II, p. 405.

"Caleb Williams" is probably the finest novel produced by a man-at least since the "Vicar of Wakefield." The sentiments, if not the opinions, from which it arose, were transient. Local usages and institutions were the subjects of its satire, exaggerated beyond the usual privilege of that species of writing. Yet it has been translated into most languages, and it has appeared in various forms, on the theatres, not only of England, but of France and Germany. There is scarcely a continental

circulating library in which it is not one of the books which most quickly require to be replaced. There is scarcely

a fiction in any language which it is so difficult to lay by. . . The passages which betray the metaphysician more than the novelist, ought to be weeded out with more than ordinary care.—MACKINTOSH, SIR JAMES, 1815, Godwin's Lives of Milton's Nephews, Edinburgh Review, vol. 25, pp. 486, 487.

Few there are who do not enter into and understand the workings of the mind. of Caleb Williams, where the demon of curiosity, finding a youth of an active and speculative disposition, without guide to advise, or business to occupy him, engages his thoughts and his time upon the task of prying into a mystery which no way concerned him, and which from the beginning he had a well-founded conviction might prove fatal to him, should he ever penetrate it. The chivalrous frenzy of Falkland, in the same piece, though perhaps awkwardly united with the character of an assassin, that love of fame to which he sacrifices honour and virtue, is another instance of a humour, or turn of mind, which, like stained glass, colours with its own peculiar tinge every object beheld by the party. SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1826, The Omen, Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 20, p.53.

"Caleb Williams" is the cream of his mind, the rest are the skimmed milk; yet in that wondrous novel all must be offended with the unnatural and improbable character of Falkland; the most accomplished, the most heroical and lofty-minded of men murders one who has affronted him, allows others to hang for the deed, and persecutes to the brink of ruin a man whose sole sin was a desire to penetrate through the mystery in which this prodigy of vice and virtue had wrapped himself. Williams suffers merely because it was necessary for the story that he should; a single word would have set all right and saved him from much unnatural terror. In short, the fault is, that the actions which the dramatis persona perform are not in keeping with their characters.-CUNNINGHAM, ALLAN, 1833, Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years.

"Caleb Williams," the earliest, is also the most popular, of our author's romances, not because his latter works have

been less rich in sentiment and passion, but because they are, for the most part, confined to the development of single characters; while in this there is the opposition and death-grapple of two beings, each endowed with poignant sensibilities and quenchless energy. There is no work of fiction which more rivets the attention -no tragedy which exhibits a struggle more sublime or sufferings more intense than this; yet to produce the effect, no complicated machinery is employed, but the springs of action are few and simple. The motives are at once common and elevated, and are purely intellectual, without appearing for an instant inadequate to their mighty issues. -TALFOURD, THOMAS NOON, 1842, Critical and Miscellaneous Writings, p, 38.

The interest of this wonderful tale is indescribable. This author possesses no humour, no powers of description, at least of nature-none of that magic which communicates to inanimate objects the light and glow of sentimentvery little pathos; but, on the other hand, few have possessed a more penetrating eye for that recondite causation which links together motive and action, a more watchful and determined consistency in tracing the manifestations of such characters as he has once conceived, or a more prevailing spirit of self-persuasion as to the reality of what he relates. The romance of "Caleb Williams" is indeed ideal; but it is an ideal totally destitute of all the trappings and ornaments of the ideal: it is like some grand picture painted in dead colour. SHAW, THOMAS B., 1847, Outlines of English Literature, pp. 382,383.

One of the most powerful and fascinating novels in the language, the plot, and its evolution, being invested with such intense interest that the didactic purpose of the work is not noticed by an ordinary reader, and may, indeed, be entirely ignored, without any detriment.-DAVIES, JAMES, 1873, English Literature from the Accession of George III. to the Battle of Waterloo, p. 139.

The novel had very great success, and was dramatized by Colman under the name of "The Iron Chest." In spite of the amazing impossibilities of the story and its unrelieved gloom; in spite of the want of almost any character to admire-since Mr. Clare, by whom Godwin probably intended

to represent his friend Fawcet, dies early in the tale; though there is no real heroine and scarcely mention of love, the story has survived and has probably been read by very many persons who, but for it, have never heard of Godwin. It is a very powerful book, and the character of Falkland the murderer is unique in literature.-PAUL, C. KEGAN, 1876, William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries, vol. I, p. 117.

The most obvious moral is that you ought not to have half a conscience. If Falkland had been thoroughly virtuous, he would not have committed murder; if thoroughly vicious, he would not have been tortured to death by remorse. But fortunately this childish design of enforcing a political theory did not spoil Godwin's story. The situation is impressive, and, in spite of many clumsy details, is impressively represented. The spectacle of a man of delicate sense of honour writhing under the dread of detection, and opposed by an incarnation of vulgar curiosity, moves us to forget the superfluous moral. --STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, William Godwin, The Fortnightly Review, vol. 26, p.459.

The interest of "Caleb Williams" is very real and very well maintained. The character of Falkland, in which all the milder virtues have been overshadowed by the memory of his crime, the sleepless curiosity of Williams in the effort to ascertain his master's secret, the price he pays for success in the persecution that dogs him unremittingly, together make up a story of an interest too powerful to permit it to be enslaved to a frigid scheme of Utopian politics.-RALEIGH, Walter, 1894, The English Novel, p. 245.

In "Caleb Williams" we have before us a revolutionary work of art, the imaginative work of a theorist, a tale which enforces a doctrine. It gains and loses by the concentration of spirit with which Godwin in it studies and works out a moral problem. To read it is to enter and explore a cavern; it is narrow; it is dark; we lose the light and air, and the clear spaces of the firmament; but the explorer's passion seizes upon us, and we grope along the narrowing walls with an intensity of curious desire. As the work of a political thinker, the book is an indictment of society. "Caleb Williams" is the one novel of the days of Revolution,

embodying the new doctrine of the time, which can be said to survive. - DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1897, The French Revolution and English Literature, pp. 66, 76.

ST. LEON

1799

Men must have arrived at an uncommon degree of general wisdom, when "St. Leon" shall no longer be read. Your Marguerite is inimitable. Knowing the model after which you drew, as often as I recollected it, my heart ached while I read. Your Bethlem Gabor is wonderfully drawn. It is like the figures of Michel Angelo, any section of an outline of which taken apart would be improbable and false, but which are so combined as to form a sublime whole. Having read I could coldly come back, and point to the caricature traits of the portrait, but while reading I could feel nothing but astonishment and admiration. Through the whole work there is so much to censure, and so much to astonish, that in my opinion it is in every sense highly interesting. Its faults and its beauties are worthy the attention of the most acute critic.-HOLCROFT, THOMAS, 1800, Letter to Godwin, Sept. 9; William Godwin by Paul, vol. II, p. 25.

I have been reading (for the little I could read) a new novel of Godwin's, in four vols., called "The Travels of St. Leon." Leon." It is an odd work, like all his, and, like all his, interesting, tho' hardly ever pleasantly so; and while one's head often agrees with his observations, and sometimes with his reasoning, never does one's heart thoroughly agree with his sentiments on any subject or in any character. He now allows that the social affections may be cultivated to advantage in human life, and upon this plan his present novel is formed. I should tell you, which I know from Edwards, that it was written for bread, agreed for by the book-sellers beforehand, and actually composed and written as the printers wanted it. I think you will see many marks of this throughout the work if you read it, which I should recommend to you, if, like me, you have not seen a readable novel for this age. BERRY, MARY, 1800, To Miss Cholmeley, Jan. 2; Extracts from Journals and Correspondence, ed. Lady Lewis, vol. II, p. 111. The character, too, of St. Leon is ably sustained-we are charmed with his early loyalty and patriotism-his elevation of

soul and tender attachment to his family; while, at the same time, his fondness for magnificence and admiration naturally prepares his acceptance of the pernicious gifts of the alchymist. Through the whole romance the dialogues are full of eloquence, and almost every scene is sketched with the strong and vivid pencil of a master. Never was escape more interesting than that of St. Leon from the Auto da Fe at Valladolid, or landscape more heart-reviving than that of his subsequent journey to the mansion of his fathers! Never did human genius portray a more frightful picture of solitude and mental desolation, than that of the mysterious stranger who arrives at the cottage of St. Leon, and leaves him the fatal bequest! At the conculsion we are left with the strongest impressions of those feelings of desertion and deadness of heart experienced by St. Leon, and which were aggravated by his constant remembrance of scenes of former happiness.-DUNLOP, JOHN, 1814-42, The History of Fiction, vol. II, p. 406.

In "St. Leon," Mr. Godwin has sought the stores of the supernatural;-but the "metaphysical aid" which he has condescended to accept, is not adapted to carry him farther from nature, but to ensure a more intimate and wide communion with its mysteries. His hero does not acquire the philosopher's stone and the elixir of immortality to furnish out for himself a dainty solitude, where he may dwell, soothed with the music of his own undying soothed with the music of his own undying thoughts, and rejoicing in his severance from his frail and transitory fellows.TALFOURD, THOMAS NOON, 1842, Critical and Miscellaneous Writings, p. 39.

Though it had a considerable reputation, and went through many editions, it never had the popularity of "Caleb Williams;" its even greater improbability removed it still more from the region of human sympathies. But the description of Marguerite, drawn from the character of Mary Wollstonecraft, and of St. Leon's married life with her, idealized from that which Godwin had himself enjoyed, are among the most beautiful passages in English fiction, while the portrait of Charles, St. Leon's son, stands alone. No such picture has elsewhere been drawn of a perfectly noble, self-sacrificing boy.PAUL, C. KEGAN, 1876, William Godwin:

his Friends and Contemporaries, vol. 1, p. 331.

LIFE OF GEOFFREY CHAUCER

1803

I may be wrong, but I think there is one considerable error runs through it, which is a conjecturing spirit, a fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt where the materials are scanty.-LAMB, CHARLES, 1803, Letter to William Godwin, Nov. 10; William Godwin by Paul, vol. II, p. 103.

The perusal of this title excited no small surprise in our critical fraternity. The authenticated passages of Chaucer's life may be comprised in half a dozen pages; and behold two voluminous quartos!

We have said that Mr. Godwin had two modes of wire-drawing and prolonging his narrative. The first is, as we have seen, by hooking in the description and history of everything that existed upon the earth at the same time with Chaucer. In this kind of composition, we usually lose sight entirely of the proposed subject of Mr. Godwin's lucubrations, travelling to Rome

or Palestine with as little remorse as if poor Chaucer had never been mentioned in the title-page. The second mode is considerably more ingenious, and consists in making old Geoffrey accompany the author upon these frisking excursions. For example, Mr. Godwin has a fancy to describe a judicial trial. Nothing can be more easily introduced; for Chaucer certainly studied at the Temple, and is supposed to have been bred to the bar.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1804, Godwin's Life of Chaucer, Edinburgh Review, vol. 3, pp. 437, 440.

In his Life of Mary Wollstonecraft he has written little and said much; and in his account of Chaucer, he has written much and said little. It has been said that a spoonful of truth will colour an ocean of fiction; and so it is seen in Godwin's "Life of Chaucer;" he heaps conjecture upon conjecture-dream upon dream-theory upon theory; scatters learning all around, and shows everywhere a deep sense of the merits of the poet; yet all that he has related might have been told in a twentieth part of the space which he has taken.- CUNNINGHAM, ALLAN, 1833, Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years.

Godwin's "Life of Chaucer," which

appeared in 1803, in two large quarto volumes, is in many ways an extraordinary specimen of biography. The perusal of the work, when for any reason that becomes an absolute necessity, is as much of the nature of a solemn literary undertaking as was its composition. It is perhaps the earliest, though unhappily not the latest or even the largest, illustration of that species of biography in which the lack of information about the man who is its alleged subject is counterbalanced by long disquisitions about anything or everything he shared in or saw, or may have shared in or seen. Godwin was always ready to tell what he did not know, to describe what he had not seen, and to explain what he did not understand.

. May indeed be declared to deserve the distinction of being the most worthless piece of biography in the English language certainly the most worthless produced by a man of real ability.-LOUNSBURY, THOMAS R., 1892, Studies in Chaucer, vol. 1, pp. 191, 194.

FLEETWOOD

1805

There is, perhaps, little general sympathy with the overstrained delicacies of Fleetwood, who, like Falkland in the "School for Scandal," is too extravagant in his peculiarities to deserve the reader's pity.-SCOTT, SIR WALTER, 1826, The Omen, Blackwood's Magazine, vol. 20, p. 53.

"Fleetwood" has less of our author's characteristic energy than any other of his works. TALFOURD, THOMAS NOON, 1842, Critical and Miscellaneous Writings, p. 40.

The best of his imaginative work is to be found in "Fleetwood;" not so much in the main story, with its stock villain and maligned wife, as in the early reminiscences of Feetwood and the episodical autobiography of Ruffigny, where the author displays a sensibility to scenery and a vivid remembrance of the feelings of childhood that would be remarkable even in a less arid mind. RALEIGH, WALTER, 1894, The English Novel, p. 247.

MANDEVILLE 1817

Powerful but unnatural and bombastic novel. CARLYLE, THOMAS, 1818, To Mr. R. Mitchell, Feb. 16; Early Letters, ed. Norton, p. 70.

Of "Mandeville," I shall say only one word. It appears to me to be a falling off in the subject, not in the ability. The style and declamation are even more powerful than ever. But unless an author surpasses himself, and surprises the public as much the fourth or fifth time as he did the first, he is said to fall off, because there is not the same stimulus of novelty. A great deal is here made out of nothing, or out of a very disagreeable subject. I cannot agree that the story is out of nature. The feeling is very common indeed; though carried to an unusual and improbable excess, or to one with which from the individuality and minuteness of the cicumstances, we cannot readily sympathise.-HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1818, Lecture on the English Novelists.

Like his other novels, it contains an important lesson, forcibly inculcated-it shows the forlornness and misery of a jealous, sullen, aspiring mind, that makes great claims on the world, without proper efforts to justify or enforce them. The author in this, as in his previous works, displays, with appalling truth, the despotic sovereignty and all searching observation of publick opinion, in so much, that one trembles with the consciousness of being subject to this tremendous power, which he cannot fly from or resist. No writer has perhaps more adequately expressed, what every body feels,-how much of the good and ill of life is involved in reputation.PHILLIPS, W., 1818, Godwin's Mandeville, North American Review, vol. 7, p. 105.

His St. Leon and his Mandeville are ten degrees darker than his Falkland in the latter, there are many ties to connect us with truth and nature, and we go on-as the sailors keep by a sinking vessel-in the hope that all must be righted soon. Mandeville is one of those unhappy persons whose minds are never so free from the storms of passion as to be fully rational, and yet cannot, save in fits of fury, be considered wholly mad.-CUNNINGHAM, ALLAN, 1833, Biographical and Critical History of the Literature of the Last Fifty Years.

"Mandeville" has all the power of its author's earliest writings, but its main subject the development of an engrossing and maddening hatred is not one which can excite human sympathy. There is, however, a bright relief to the gloom of