little for the obscuration of the record. Mr. Kegan Paul is one of those accurate writers, from whom Mr. Froude has warned me not to differ. In due course something more will be said of Mr. Kegan Paul’s services to Shelleyan research, but for the moment readers are invited to give their attention to a more notable man of letters.

Born at Wisbech, Co. Cambridge, on 3rd March, 1756, William Godwin was in his fifty-sixth year when he received Shelley’s letter of entreaty for sympathy and guidance. The son of a Dissenting minister, who never rose to any eminence or a higher stipend than 60l. a-year in his vocation, William Godwin was reared amongst people of lowly fortune and rude manners, in the eastern counties, receiving in his boyhood, from teachers of no singular efficiency, an education neither greatly better nor greatly worse than the training ordinarily given to English boys of his social degree in the later half of the last century. On escaping from these schoolmasters, one of whom he had served in the capacity of an usher, the future man of letters went to the Hoxton College in order to qualify himself for his father’s calling; and on leaving that seminary he officiated for a few years as a Non-conforming minister, preaching and otherwise labouring in a way of life for which he soon discovered his unfitness, first at Ware in Hertfordshire, then at Stowmarket in Suffolk, and then at Beaconsfield, Co. Bucks. A volume of sermons, published some while after their delivery to rural congregations, still remains in evidence that if Godwin in his days of irregular reverence was as good a preacher as the average Non-conforming pulpiteers of his period, Dissenters were edified in George the Third’s earlier time with worse sermons than is generally supposed.

Ere long the young minister discovered that he could not believe what he was bound to teach. That from manhood’s threshold he was more than slightly disposed to religious scepticism is shown by the curious disputation he held on paper, during his last year at Hoxton, with a fellow-student, the question of the strictly private and confidential controversy being the existence of the Deity. Could he have proved to his satisfaction the existence of the Almighty, Godwin conceived he would be troubled by no doubt of the truth of Christianity, nor by any disposition to quarrel with the refinements of Calvinistic doctrine. Under these circumstances Godwin took the negative side in the secret controversy, hoping that his arguments would be demolished and his faith settled by his fellow-collegian. The result of the conflict does not appear. Possibly the paper war satisfied the doubter that he could conscientiously enter the ministry. If so, it only suppressed for a period the doubts that determined Godwin a few years later to seek another means of livelihood. At Beaconsfield (1783) he was converted to Socinianism by Priestley’s Institutes. Five years later he had passed through Socinianism into Deism.

On becoming a Unitarian he took the ordinary course of a young man who, too poor to live in idleness, and too honest to live by daily falsehood, possesses studious tastes and literary aptitude. Coming to London he sought employment of the publishers, and contrived to live hardly, painfully, temperately, as a book-maker and publisher’s hack, whilst he persisted in the labours of a student. Producing in his twenty-eighth year a Life of Lord Chatham, for which he got nothing, and the Defence of the Rockingham Party, for which Stockdale paid him five guineas, he went on reading strenuously and writing as he best could,—throwing off articles for the English Review at two guineas a-sheet, turning out forgotten novels for which he was paid from five to twenty guineas, translating for Murray the French MS. Memoirs of Simon Lord Lovat; doing whatever work came to hand, till he was appointed at sixty guineas per annum to write the historical part of Robinson’s New Annual Register, and to contribute articles to the Political Herald,—two engagements that, coming to him in his thirtieth year, gave him at the same time a sense of success and a sense of financial security.

The poverty and hardship, in which he had been trained from childhood till he dropt the title of ‘Reverend’ and determined to live honestly by the pen instead of living dishonestly by the pulpit, were serviceable to the booksellers’ hack, whom they had taught how to live with comfort and contentment on a precarious number of weekly shillings. The young man, who dined sufficiently well on a chop and potato, and conceived himself to have dined luxuriously after consuming a large beefsteak and a pint of porter, had in some respects the advantage of literary competitors, who together with higher culture had acquired at Oxford or Cambridge a taste for higher living. On approaching middle life he could, however, have afforded to relinquish the frugal habits formed during his early struggles. The persevering hack, who steadily prosecuted various studies whilst toiling for the publishers; the religious inquirer, who passed through Socinianism on his way from Calvinism to Deism; the resolute Radical, who sought the justification of his political sentiments in philosophical principles, whilst living in close friendship with Thomas Holcroft, and cordial good fellowship with Thomas Paine, was a man, certain to achieve eminence sooner or later in the republic of letters. If it came to him less than soon, celebrity came to Godwin none too late for its perfect enjoyment. He was still in his thirty-eighth year, when he published Political Justice,—the work for which Robinson is said to have paid him, at different times, sums amounting to a thousand guineas; the work that made him famous as a teacher of philosophical Radicalism. If it made him the best-abused man of the three kingdoms, this daring and in some respects superlatively unsound book rendered him the idol of political enthusiasts in every quarter of the country. Unalluring in design, repellent in style, usually guarded in expression, sold at a price that kept it from the hands of the multitude whom it was intended chiefly to benefit, the frigid and passionless work, whose principles could not fail to make it regarded with disfavour by the majority of the wealthier class, possessed no feature or quality, apart from its attractive title, its aims and its general audacity, to humour the popular taste and win popular applause. For such a work shrewd judges of the book-market might well have predicted commercial failure. It was, however, successful from every point of view. Successful for its immediate and later effect on the readers it was especially intended to influence, it was fortunate in a sale that exceeded the anticipations of author and publisher, and fortunate in the determination of the Government to take no measures to check its circulation.

Published in 1793, Political Justice was still rising in public esteem, when Godwin produced (in May 1794) Caleb Williams; a novel that was largely indebted for its singular popularity to the influence of the political treatise. The books may be said to have run together, and united in placing their author amongst the most famous writers of his generation,—the success of the novel stimulating the success of the scientific study, whilst admiration of the philosopher’s reasonings quickened the interest in his work of fancy. Whilst readers hastened eagerly from the tale of terror to the work of unemotional demonstration, others passed with curiosity from the volumes of the political philosopher to the pages of the enthralling story. In the annals of English letters there is no other case of an author, achieving almost at the same moment so sensational a celebrity in two such different departments of literary enterprise.

In the days when