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 length floats on the calm wave that is to bear it down the stream of time.  Mr. Godwin’s person is not known, he is not pointed out in the street, his conversation is not courted, his opinions are not asked, he is at the head of no cabal, he belongs to no party in the State, he has no train of admirers, no one thinks it worth his while even to traduce and vilify him, he has scarcely friend or foe, the world make a point (as Goldsmith used to say) of taking no more notice of him than if such an individual had never existed; he is to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and buried; but the author of Political Justice and of Caleb Williams can never die, his name is an abstraction in letters, his works are standard in the history of intellect.  He is thought of now like any eminent writer a hundred-and-fifty years ago, or just as he will be a hundred-and-fifty years hence.  He knows this, and smiles in silent mockery of himself, reposing on the monument of his fame—­

  “Sedet, in eternumque sedebit infelix Theseus.”

No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice.  Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist.  Truth, moral truth, it was supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of thought.  “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, “and read Godwin on Necessity.”  Sad necessity!  Fatal reverse!  Is truth then so variable?  Is it one thing at twenty, and another at forty?  Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814?  Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense!  Let us pause here a little.—­Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time.  What then?  Because those opinions were overcharged, were they therefore altogether groundless?  Is the very God of our idolatry all of a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema?  Could so many young men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by what had neither truth, nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling nor the least shew of reason in it?  Is the Modern Philosophy (as it has been called) at one moment a youthful bride, and the next a withered beldame, like the false Duessa in Spenser?  Or is the vaunted edifice of Reason, like his House of Pride, gorgeous in front, and dazzling to approach, while “its hinder parts are ruinous, decayed, and old?” Has the main prop, which supported the mighty fabric, been shaken and given way under the strong grasp of some Samson; or has it not rather been undermined by rats and vermin?  At one time, it almost seemed, that “if this failed,