that was pervading Europe.

Godwin has been frequently charged with alarm at the anarchist phantom
he had raised. It is certain not merely that he altered and softened the
_Political Justice_ not a little, but that in his next work of the same
kind, _The Enquirer_, he took both a very different line of
investigation and a different tone of handling. In the preface he
represents it as a sort of inductive complement to the high _a priori_
scheme of his former work; but this is not a sufficient account of the
matter. It is true that his paradoxical rebellion against conventions
appears here and there; and his literary criticism, which was never
strong, may be typified by his contrast of the "hide-bound sportiveness"
of Fielding with the "flowing and graceful hilarity" of Sterne. Indeed,
this sentence takes Godwin's measure pretty finally, and shows that he
was of his age, not for all time. But, on the other hand, it is fair to
say that the essays on "The Study of the Classics" and the "Choice of
Reading," dealing with subjects on which, both then and since, oceans of
cant and nonsense have been poured forth, are nearly as sound as they
can be.

In his purely imaginative work he presents a contrast not much less
strange. We may confine attention here to the two capital examples of
it. _Caleb Williams_ alone has survived as a book of popular reading,
and it is no small tribute to its power that, a full century after its
publication, it is still kept on sale in sixpenny editions. Yet on no
novel perhaps is it so difficult to adjust critical judgment, either by
the historical or the personal methods. Both its general theme--the
discovery of a crime committed by a man of high reputation and unusual
moral worth, and the persecution of the discoverer by the criminal--and
its details, are thoroughly leavened and coloured by Godwin's political
and social views at the time; and either this or some other defect has
made it readable with great difficulty at all times by some persons,
among whom I am bound to enrol myself. Yet the ingenuity of its
construction, in spite of the most glaring impossibilities, the striking
situations it contains, and no doubt other merits, have always secured
readers for it. _St. Leon_, a romance of the _elixir vitae_, has no
corresponding central interest, and, save in the amiable but very
conventional figure of the heroine Marguerite, who is said to have been
studied from Mary Wollstonecraft, no interes