vulgar-minded. Ever accessible to flatterers, he swallowed the grossest adulations with keen relish;—with ludicrous greed, if it were prepared for his palate by feminine artifice. When the postman laid a letter on his Skinner-Street shop-counter, the philosopher’s countenance flushed if he saw himself designated in the superscription ‘Mr. Godwin,’ instead of ‘William Godwin, esquire.’

On the other hand, he had numerous good qualities. He was, upon the whole, truthful and honest; just to men he disliked and principles he disapproved, and altogether the benevolent man he commended himself for being. In all that related to, his opinions on politics, religion, and the social virtues, and his ways of promulgating and enforcing those opinions, he was sincere as sunlight, and absolutely cantless. The only fault of his sympathetic and judicious benevolence was that it sometimes exceeded his means. Alike in the days when he was a needy hack, in his brief term of prosperity, and in the long period of his financial difficulties, poor people hung about him and had money from him. Beneficent to his indigent relatives, he was no less beneficent to persons not of his kindred. The interest he displayed in young men, and the pains he took for their mental, moral, and material welfare, cannot be too highly commended. From the date of his marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was a bright example of domestic virtue. A good husband to that curious woman, who, during their brief association, tried him not a little with her captious and querulous temper; he was a good husband to his second wife, who (though by no means so bad a person as the wilder Shelleyan enthusiasts would have us believe) tried him for a long period almost as vexatiously as Mary Wollstonecraft tried him for a short one. A man is not to be extolled for being good to his own children. But it is much to Godwin’s credit that, whilst he was a good father to his daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, and to his son by his second wife, he was quite as good a father to his three step-children—to Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny, to Charles Clairmont (the second Mrs. Godwin’s son by her former husband), and to Charles’s sister Jane,—the Jane Clairmont alias Claire of Byronic story.

But though he is to be respected for all these good, honest, wholesome qualities, it remains that Godwin’s unemotional nature and unrefined homeliness forbid the biographer to write rapturously about him. No considerable man of letters has, in recent times, been more curiously wanting in the mental, moral, and personal graces, which the fancy is apt to associate with famous followers of the higher arts. Though he wrote many novels (one of them being a tale of no uncommon vigour), he was curiously wanting in romantic fervour and imaginativeness. Though he was ambitious of writing for the stage, and made several essays in dramatic literature, he was absolutely devoid of poetical sensibility. Capable of firm, though cold, friendship, he was absolutely incapable of love. When it occurred to him, in his twenty-ninth year, that he might as well have a wife to cook his daily chop and look after his shirt-buttons, he commissioned his sister to look out for a suitable young woman. In middle-age, when he slipped from ordinary friendship into a closer alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was careful to provide himself with a peculiar and private lodging at a convenient distance from their common home in ‘The Polygon,’ Somers Town, in order that he might be able to spend most of his time well out of her way. Some ten or twelve months later, Mary Wollstonecraft was on her death-bed, sinking tranquilly, even happily, out of this life, under the soothing influence of an anodyne, given her a short time before by her medical attendant. ‘Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven!’ she ejaculated, in gratitude for the effect of the medicine, to her husband, standing over her. ‘You mean, my dear,’ he replied with more self-command than tenderness, ‘that your physical sensations are somewhat easier.’ It is all well, and very amusing, for Mr. Kegan Paul to gush over the ‘blight’ that came to Godwin’s heart and life, from his ‘untimeous’ loss of the woman he never loved,—the woman whose tenderest feelings for him differed widely from the emotions of love. But readers of this page can need no assurance that the materialist, who reproved his wife so drolly for thinking herself in heaven, never took her to his embrace because he thought her an angel.

CHAPTER II.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.