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William Godwin (1756-1836), who professed to descend from the great Earl Godwin, of the West Saxons, was really the son of a Nonconformist minister at Wisbeach, where he was born on the 3rd of March 1756. In early life he joined the sect of the Sandemanians, and became a preacher amongst them until the year 1783, when his mind became imbued with sceptical ideas, and resigning his ministry he came up to London to live by literature. Ten years later he published his first important work, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which introduced into English society the ideas of the Revolution, and produced a vast sensation. In 1794 this was followed by the powerful novel of Caleb Williams. He now formed the acquaintance of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), a woman of high intellect and talent, greatly in advance of her time, who suffered a specious sort of social martyrdom for her Radical ideas,

and who has scarcely received her due from posterity. She was the author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787, and of Vindication of the Rights of Women, 1794, the latter dedicated to Talleyrand. Godwin met her when, deserted by a man called Gilbert Imlay, whom she had loved, she was in deep distress, and when she had recently. attempted to drown herself by leaping from Putney Bridge. He consoled her, and early in 1797 he persuaded her to marry him. She died five months later after giving birth to a daughter, Mary, afterwards the second wife of Shelley. In 1799 Godwin published a second novel, St. Leon, and in 1801 he married again, Mrs. Clairmont, a "very disgusting " widow, who wore green spectacles, and had daughters, one of whom was the Jane Clairmont, afterwards so prominent in the lives of Byron and Shelley. Under the influence of his second wife the moral character of Godwin degenerated. It was in 1811 that he began to know Shelley in conditions only too familiar to us. His financial difficulties culminated in his bankruptcy in 1822. Much in Godwin's later life was sordid and unpleasing, although in 1833 his poverty was relieved by his appointment to be Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer on a small salary. He died in his official residence in New Palace Yard on the 7th of April 1836. It is somewhat difficult to reconcile the squalid anecdotes which have been preserved in regard to Godwin with the enthusiastic respect which was paid him by young men of brilliant gifts from Canning down to Lytton Bulwer. We are less indulgent to him, and we are more inclined to dwell upon "Godwin's house of sordid horror, and Godwin preaching and holding the hat-what a set!" as Matthew Arnold ejaculates.

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After the Portrait by J. Opie

THE CLOSE OF "CALEB WILLIAMS."

I record the praises bestowed on me by Falkland, not because I deserve them, but because they serve to aggravate the baseness of my cruelty. He survived but three days this dreadful scene. I have been his murderer. It was fit that he should praise

my patience, who had fallen a victim, life and fame, to my precipitation! It would have been merciful, in comparison, if I had planted a dagger in his heart. He would have thanked me for my kindness. But atrocious, execrable wretch that I have been, I wantonly inflicted on him an anguish a thousand times worse than death. Meanwhile I endure the penalty of my crime. His figure is ever in imagination before me. Waking or sleeping, I still behold him. He seems mildly to expostulate with me for my unfeeling behaviour. I live the devoted victim of conscious reproach. Alas! I am the

Miss Melvile complies with the suggestion of her mamma. One morning immediatel after breakfast she wont to her harpsichord, & Water one after another several of those airs that were most the favourited of Me Tyrrel. My takeman war getized; the servants were gone to then respectivel employments. M. Tyrrel wont have gone also; his mind was unthined, & he did not take the pleasure he had been accustomed to take. in the musical performances of Emil. But he finger was now more tasteful than common. Her mind was probably wrought ich to a firmes & bolder tone of the recollection of the cause she was going to pleas, at the same time that it was exempt from thod. incapacitating # tremors which wouh have been felt by one that dared not took povest in the face. M. Tyndel was, unable to leave the apartment. Sometimes he traversed it withs. impatient step; then he hung over the poor innocent whose powers were exerted to please him; att length he threw him :self in a chair opposite, with his eyes tune tomans smil. It was easy to trace the progrefs of his emotions. The pur sour into which his countenanc wat contractes were gradually belaxed; his featmer were brightener into a smile; the kindness with which he has when former occasions contemplater Emith seemar. to revive in his heart.

Extract from the MS. of "Caleb Williams"

same Caleb Williams that so short a time ago boasted that, however great were the calamities I endured, I was still innocent.

Such has been the result of a project I formed for delivering myself from the evils that had so long attended me. I thought that if Falkland were dead, I should return once again to all that makes life worth possessing. I thought that if the guilt of Falkland were established, fortune and the world would smile upon my efforts. Both these events are accomplished, and it is now only that I am truly miserable.

Why should my reflections perpetually centre upon myself, an overweening regard to which has been the source of my errors! Falkland, I will think only of thee, and from that thought will draw ever fresh nourishment for my sorrows! One generous, one disinterested tear I will consecrate to thy ashes! A nobler spirit lived not among

Supernatural

Fiction

the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society! It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. All that, in a happier field and a purer air, would expand into virtue and germinate into usefulness, is thus converted into henbane and deadly nightshade.

The spirit of change was everywhere in the air, and it showed itself in the field of diverting literature no less than in that of political controversy. The growth of mediævalism in fiction has been traced back to Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1764), where the supernatural was

Matthew Gregory Lewis

After the Portrait by H. W. Pickersgill

boldly introduced into pseudoGothic romance. This innovation was greatly admired, and presently, having been reinforced by the influence of German neo-mediæval narrative, was copiously imitated. In the last decade of the eighteenth century, Mrs. Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, and Beckford, presently followed by Maturin, founded what has been called the School of Terror, in the form of romantic novels in which fear was treated as the dominant passion. These "bogey" stories were very widely appreciated, and they served both to free the public mind from the fetters of conventional classic imagery, and to prepare it to receive impressions of enthusiasm and wonder. After having been shut up for more than a hundred years in the cage of a

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sort of sceptical indifferentism, the nature of man was blinded by the light of liberty, and staggered about bewildered by very strange phenomena. These crude romance-writers had a definite and immediate influence on the poets with whom the beginning of the next chapter will deal, but they also affected the whole future of English prose romance.

The Revolutionists created, mainly in order to impress their ideas more easily upon the public, a school of fiction which is interesting as leading in the opposite direction from Mrs. Radcliffe and Maturin, namely, towards the realistic and philosophical novel as we know it to-day. Bage, Hannah More, Holcroft, and even Godwin are not read any longer, and may be considered as having ceased to occupy any prominent position in our literature. But they form a valuable link between Fielding and Smollett on the one hand, and Jane Austen and the modern naturalistic school on the other.

When the age was suddenly given over to sliding

panels and echoing vaults, and the touch in the dark of "the mealy and carious bones of a skeleton," these humdrum novelists restored the balance of common-sense and waited for a return to sanity. The most difficult figure to fit in to any progressive scheme of English fiction is FRANCES BURNEY, who was actually alive with Samuel Richardson and with Mr. George Meredith. She wrote seldom, and published at long intervals; her best novels, founded on a judicious study of Marivaux and Rousseau, implanted on a strictly British soil, were produced a little earlier than the moment we have now reached. Yet the Wanderer was published simultaneously with Waverley. She is a social satirist of a very sprightly order, whose early Evelina and Cecilia were written with an ease which she afterwards unluckily abandoned for an aping of the pomposity of her favourite lexicographer. Miss Burney was a delightful novelist in her youth, but, unless she influenced Miss Austen, she took no part in the progressive development of English literature.

Ann Ward (1764-1823), who became Mrs. Radcliffe in 1787, was the author of six or seven hyper-romantic novels, of which The Mysteries of Udolph, 1794, a book of real power and value in spite of its extravagance, is the most famous. After a brief and rather brilliant career as a romance-writer, Mrs. Radcliffe withdrew from literature after publishing The Italian in 1797. Matthew Gregory Lewis (17751818), a prominent figure in the

theatrical and social life of his time, was the author of numerous plays, and of the too scandalously famous romance of The Monk, published anonymously in 1796. The close of "Monk" Lewis' life was mainly spent in the West Indies; he died at sea on the 14th of May 1818. More than twenty years later the picturesque circumstances of his career were revived by the publication of his Life and Letters. A still more singular figure was that of William Beckford (1760-1844), whose Vathek was published, under circumstances of curious mystery, in English in London, and in French at Paris and Lausanne in 1786-7. Beckford was a man of great wealth and of fantastic eccentricity. He spent an immense fortune upon his estate of Fonthill in Wiltshire, where he had been born on the 1st of October 1760, and where he continued to live, half hermit, half rajah, until in 1822 ruin fell on him and he was obliged to sell the property and the dream-fabric he had piled upon it. Beckford retired to Bath, where he lived until his death on the 2nd of May 1844. Robert Bage (1728-1801) and Thomas Holcroft (1744-1809) were Quakers by birth who

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William Beckford

From a Medallion by P. Sauvage

Fanny
Burney

became Jacobins by persuasion, and who supported the principles of the French Revolution. Bage's best novel is Barham Downs (1784); Holcroft's romances are forgotten, but his tragi-comedy of The Road to Ruin (1792) is remarkable as the earliest English melodrama, and his excellent Memoirs are still read. Holcroft's life was singularly eventful; he was the son of a London cobbler whose mother "dealt in greens and oysters," and he was brought up to be a pedlar, then a stable-boy, then a jockey, then a strolling actor. It was not until the age of five-and-thirty that he turned his attention, with marked success, to literature.

From a Caricature

Violent, crabbed, distressingly energetic, a furious democrat, a sour and satirical moral pedant, there was yet something in the independence and simplicity of Holcroft which was very taking. In 1794 he voluntarily surrendered, in company with Horne Tooke, and others, to the charge of high treason, but was discharged. He was the author of four novels and of more than thirty plays. Holcroft died on the 23rd of March 1809. Finally, Hannah More (17451833), the friend of Johnson, Garrick, Burke, and Reynolds, was a religious and moral writer of extreme popularity, who in 1808 published

very diverting, although didactic novel, Calebs in Search of a Wife. Hannah More, who was one of the

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best-paid authors of her age, distributed more than one fortune in profuse benefactions, and is among the quaintest and most charming figures of her class in the eighteenth century.

Frances Burney, afterwards Madame D'Arblay (1752-1840), was the third child and second daughter of the historian of music, Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814), and his first wife, Esther Sleepe, a Frenchwoman. She was born at King's Lynn on June 13, 1752. When she was eight years old the family removed to London; her mother died in 1761, and five years later her father mar:ied again. She was an odd child, and, when her sisters were carefully educated, she for some reason escaped all schooling; "I was never placed under any governess or instructor whatsoever." On the other hand, from a very early age she was incessantly teaching herself by reading and scribbling, and she enjoyed to the full the advantages of the brilliant social circle in which her father moved, with Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and the rest. She began her famous diary in 1768. It was long, however, before she could persuade

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