men of worth and genius at variance, that the most eloquent and glowing panegyric ever pronounced on Francis Jeffrey came from the lips of John Wilson.*

WILLIAM GODWIN.

"WHO'S Godwin?" said once a respectable person to us, while panegyrising in our own way the venerable sage. As we hear the question echoed by some of our readers, we propose to tell them a little about him, and do not despair of getting them to love him, ere we be done. William Godwin was a philosopher, and a philosophical novelist, an essayist, a biographer, at one period a preacher, and the author of a volume of sermons, the writer of one or two defunct tragedies, a historian, the founder of a small but distinguished school of writers, in England and America; and, in spite of his errors, an exceedingly candid, generous, simple-minded, and honest man. His intellect was clear, searching, sagacious, and profound. He thought every subject out and out for himself, using, however, the while, the aids derived from an enlarged intimacy with still deeper and subtler understandings. His was not that one-sided intensity of original view which is at once the power and the weakness of a very rare order of minds. He had not the one huge glaring orb of a Cyclops, letting in a flood of rushing and furious splendour, and rendering its possessor miserable in his might: his mental glance was mild, full, penetrating, and comprehensive. He was not gifted with the power of adding any new truth to the precious catalogue. He was the eloquent interpreter and fearless follower out of the subtle speculations of such men as Berkeley, Hobbes, Hume, Coleridge, and Ricardo. There was a "daring consistency" in the mode by which he built up his system of the universe. Seizing on the paradoxes of preceding philosophers, stones rejected by other builders, he put them together, interfused them with a certain cement of his own, and reared with them a towering and formidable structure. His "Theory of Political Justice" was a

*This sketch was originally written in Lord Jeffrey's lifetime. Seldom did the death of a celebrated man produce a more powerful impression on his own city and circle, and a less powerful impression on the wide horizon of the world. In truth, he had outlived himself. It had been very different, had he passed away thirty years ago, when the "Edinburgh Review" was in the plenitude of its influence. As it was, he disappeared like a star at midnight, while the whole heavens are white with glory, not like a sun going down that night may come up the universe. He was one of the acutest, most accomplished, most warm-hearted, and most generous of men. May his infirmi ties be forgotten-his attacks on the Lakers and other critical commissions rot; but let his memory and his many contributions to a refined and beautiful criticism, live for ever!

tower of Babel, composed of the most contradictory materials "in ruin reconciled;" partly of the sophistries of Hume, partly of the subtleties of Jonathan Edwards; here a stone from the quarries of Spinoza, and there a bale of goods from the warehouse of Adam Smith. The grand principle pervading his works was, that love to being in general ought, if not to annihilate, to overshadow private relations, and individual charities. Snatching this paradox, or, at best, partial truth, from the holy hand of the author of the "Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Freedom of the Will,” he carried it around as a touchstone to every institution of society. We can easily conceive what wild work he would thus make. He became, indeed, in the language of Burke, one of the “ablest architects of ruin," as if he had learned it from the "old earthquake demon," described by his great son-in-law. On titles and on property, on monarchy and on marriage, on commerce and on gratitude, he trode with disdain. Necessity, he proclaimed, in one of the most fascinating and eloquent chapters of philosophical criticism we have ever read, to be the Mother of the World. And yet everything must be changed! Thrones were bubbles; titles, nicknames; crowns, momentary circles in the stream of ages; the marriage-ring, degrading as the link of the prisoner, or the round fetter of the slave. Old things were to pass away: all things to be made new. Even the "law and the testimony" were to be veiled, if not obliterated. A new era must burst upon the world. Man must erect himself from his thousand slaveries-free

It was a brilliant, but dangerous vision; one of those sun-tinted phantasms which rose from the gulf of the French Revolution, ere it had yet become an abyss of blood. We have recounted it thus calmly, because its author was a harmless and sincere enthusiast; because, gossamer though its web was, it caught for a season such dragon-flies as Coleridge and Wordsworth (who said to a student, "Burn your books of chemistry, and read Godwin on Necessity""); because, thirdly, it has long ago vanished from the public attention, and, indeed, before his death, its more obnoxious parts were either expressly or silently renounced by the writer himself.

It were vain at this time of day to analyse or argue against a

forgotten dream. Enough to acknowledge, which we do now with all safety, that it was a work of much power and eloquence-that it was written in a clear, terse, fluent, and even brilliant stylethat, though the root of the thinking lay generally in other writers, yet the bold turn and shoot of the branches, and the fell lustre of the fruit, were all his own; and that it must always be interesting as one of the most deliberate, laboured, and daring attempts ever made by man, to found a system of society utterly distinct and insulated from every other that has existed before. It may be called an effort by a single hand to "roll back the eternal wheels of the universe." And now, to recur to a former figure, it seems to the imagination, through the vista of half a century, to rise up a great, grotesque structure, which, unsanctioned by Deity, unfinished by its architect, deserted by its friends, mutilated by its foes, stands an everlasting monument of the mingled wisdom and folly, the strength and the weakness, of

man.

Never did book rise or sink more rapidly. Now it flared a meteor, "with fear of change perplexing monarchs," as well as lightening into many a still chamber, and many an enthusiast heart; and now it sunk a cold and heavy dreg upon the ground. While "Caleb Williams" is in every circulating library, and needed at one time more frequently, we have heard, than almost any novel, to be replaced, the "Inquiry into Political Justice" is read only by a few hardy explorers, and reminds them, contrasting its past influence with its present neglect, of some cataract, once the terror and the glory of the wilderness, but which, by the fall of its cliff of vantage, has been robbed of its voice of thunder, shorn of its Samson-like locks of spray, dwarfed into comparative insipidity, deserted by its crowding admirers, and left to pine alone in the desert of which it was once the pride, and to sigh for the days of other years. And yet, while of "Caleb Williams" it was predicted by some sapient friend, that, if published, it would be the grave of his literary reputation, the other lifted him, as on dragon wings, into instant and dangerous popularity; the "Inquiry" was the balloon which bore him giddily up-the novel the parachute which broke his fall.

As a novelist, indeed, Godwin, apart from the accidents of opinion and popular caprice, occupies a higher place than as a philosopher. As a philosopher, he is neither altogether new nor altogether true; he is ingenious, but unsafe, and the width of the field he traverses, and the celerity with which he runs across it, and the calm dogmatism with which he announces the most extreme and startling opinions, excite suspicions as to the depth of his knowledge, and the comprehension of his views. They surround the figure of the sage with an air and edging of charlatanerie. As a novelist, on the contrary, he passes for no more than

he is a real and robust original. He proceeds in this walk with the exulting freedom and confidence of one who has hit on a vein entirely new. He imagines a character after his own heart; a quiet, curious, prying, philosophical being, with a strong underdash of the morbid, if not of the mad; and he thickens around him circumstances, which, by making him altogether a misanthrope, and nearly a maniac, bring out all the powers and the passions of his nature. The main actor in each of his tales, at first recumbent, is, at length, ere you leave him, rampant with whatever may be the pervading principle of his being. And so with the author himself; he, too, catches fire by running. At first slow, embarrassed, uninteresting, commonplace, he becomes rapid, ardent, overpowering. The general tone of his writing, however, is calm. "In the very whirlwind of his passion, he begets a temperance which gives it smoothness." His heat is never that of the sun with all his beams around him; but of the round rayless orb seen shining from the summit of Mont Blanc, still and stripped in the deep black ether. He has more passion than imagination. And even his passion he has learned more by sympathy than by personal feeling. And amid his most tempestuous scenes, you see the calm and stern eye of philosophic analysis looking on. His imagery is not copious, nor always original, but its sparse-ness is its strength; it startles you with unexpected and momentary brilliance; the flash comes sudden as the lightning; like it, too, it comes from the clouds, and like it, it bares the breast of heaven in an instant, and in an instant is gone. No preparatory flourish or preliminary sound-no sheets of useless splendour;each figure is a fork of fire which strikes, and needs no second blow. Nay, often his images are singularly commonplace, and you wonder how they move you so, till you resolve this into the power of the hand which flings its own energy in them. His style is not the least remarkable thing about his compositions. It is a smooth succession of short and simple sentences, each clear as crystal, and none ever distracting the attention from the subject to its own construction. It is a style in which you cannot explain how the total effect rises out of the individual parts, and which is forgotten as entirely during perusal as is the pane of glass through which you gaze at a comet or a star. The form, too, favours the general effect. Each narrative takes the shape of an autobiography, and the incessant recurrence of the pronoun I transports you to a confessional, where you hear told you, in subdued tones, a tale which might "rouse the dead to hear." Systematically, he rejects the use of supernatural machinery, profuse descriptions, and mere mechanical horrors. Like Brockden Brown, he despises to summon up a ghost from the grave; he invokes the "mightier might" of the passions of living flesh; he excites terror often, but it is the terror which dilated man wields

over his fellow, colossal and crushing but distinct; not the vague and shadowy form of fear which springs from preternatural agency. His path is not, like that of Monk Lewis and Maturin, sulphureous and slippery, as through some swart mine; it is a terribil via, but clear, direct, above ground-a line of light passing through forests, over mountains, and by the brink of precipices. He wants, of course, the multitudinous variety of Scott, the uniform sparkle of Bulwer, the wit of the author of "Anastasius," the light effervescent humour of Dickens, the oriental gusto and gorgeousness of Beckford, the severe truth of Mrs Inchbald and Miss Austin, the caustic vein and ripe scholarship of Lockhart, the refined elegance of Ward, the breadth of Cooper, the rough, sarcastic strength of Marryatt, the grotesque horror of the Victor Hugo school; not to speak of the genial power of Cervantes, the humour of Le Sage, the farce of Smollett, Fielding's anatomising eye, Richardson's mastery over the tragedies of the fireside, Defoe's minute and lingering touch; but, in one savage corner of the art, we see him seated, Salvator-like, among the fiercest forms of nature, scarcely seen, yet insensibly mingling with his thoughts, and directing his pencil-drawing with fearless dash the ruins, not of cities, but of men-painting, to use his own words, the "sublime desolation of mighty souls," and searching, not, like Byron, the "dark bosoms" of pirates, and red-handed lords, and men of genius exalted to the cold and dismal elevation of universal doubt, and self-exiled and insulated sinners, mad with the memory of crime, changing the still bosom of Alpine solitudes into the howling bedlam of their own remorse, and shriving themselves amid eternal snow; but turning inside out the "dark bosoms" of dismissed body men, and moody solitarys, and chivalric murderers, and strong spirits soured into something more dreadful than misanthropy, and alchymists, cut off by gold, as by a great gulf, from the sympathies of their fellow-men; in exploring such breasts, Godwin is one of the mightiest of masters. His novels resemble the paintings of John Martin, being a gallery, nay, a world in themselves; and it is a gloomy gallery and a strange world. In both, monotony and mannerism are incessant, but the monotony is that of the sounding deep, the mannerism that of the thunderbolts of heaven. Martin might append to his one continual flash of lightning, which is present in all his pictures, now to reveal a deluge, now to garland the brow of a fiend-now to rend the veil of a temple, and now to guide the invaders through the breach of a city-the words, "John Martin, his mark." Godwin's novels are not less terribly distinguished, to those who understand their cipher-the deep scar of misery, branded, whether literally, as in "Mandeville," or figuratively, as in all his other tales, upon the brow of the "Victim of Society." We well remember our first reading of "Caleb Williams." We