. He was afterwards at the
University, and he has described the scruples of an ingenuous
youthful mind about subscribing the articles, in a passage in his
_Church-of-Englandism_, which smacks of truth and honour both, and does
one good to read it in an age, when "to be honest" (or not to laugh at
the very idea of honesty) "is to be one man picked out of ten thousand!"
Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes, after the fatigue of study, by
playing on a fine old organ, and has a relish for Hogarth's prints. He
turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn
men in the same manner. He has no great fondness for poetry, and can
hardly extract a moral out of Shakespear. His house is warmed and
lighted by steam. He is one of those who prefer the artificial to the
natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent. He has a
great contempt for out-of-door prospects, for green fields and
trees, and is for referring every thing to Utility. There is a little
narrowness in this; for if all the sources of satisfaction are taken
away, what is to become of utility itself? It is, indeed, the great
fault of this able and extraordinary man, that he has concentrated his
faculties and feelings too entirely on one subject and pursuit, and has
not "looked enough abroad into universality."[B]

[Footnote A: Now Lord Colchester.]

[Footnote B: Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning.]

* * * * *

WILLIAM GODWIN

The Spirit of the Age was never more fully-shewn than in its treatment
of this writer--its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission
to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. Five-and-twenty years ago he
was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed
as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more
looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice
was the theme, his name was not far off:--now he has sunk below the
horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. Mr.
Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the
mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame.

His bark, after being tossed in the revolutionary tempest, now raised to
heaven by all the fury of popular breath, now almost dashed in pieces,
and buried in the quicksands of ignorance, or scorched with the
lightning of momentary indignation, at