have appeared in our times.  It is not merely that these novels are very well for a philosopher to have produced—­they are admirable and complete in themselves, and would not lead you to suppose that the author, who is so entirely at home in human character and dramatic situation, had ever dabbled in logic or metaphysics.  The first of these, particularly, is a master-piece, both as to invention and execution.  The romantic and chivalrous principle of the love of personal fame is embodied in the finest possible manner in the character of Falkland;[B] as in Caleb Williams (who is not the first, but the second character in the piece) we see the very demon of curiosity personified.  Perhaps the art with which these two characters are contrived to relieve and set off each other, has never been surpassed in any work of fiction, with the exception of the immortal satire of Cervantes.  The restless and inquisitive spirit of Caleb Williams, in search and in possession of his patron’s fatal secret, haunts the latter like a second conscience, plants stings in his tortured mind, fans the flame of his jealous ambition, struggling with agonized remorse; and the hapless but noble-minded Falkland at length falls a martyr to the persecution of that morbid and overpowering interest, of which his mingled virtues and vices have rendered him the object.  We conceive no one ever began Caleb Williams that did not read it through:  no one that ever read it could possibly forget it, or speak of it after any length of time, but with an impression as if the events and feelings had been personal to himself.  This is the case also with the story of St. Leon, which, with less dramatic interest and intensity of purpose, is set off by a more gorgeous and flowing eloquence, and by a crown of preternatural imagery, that waves over it like a palm-tree!  It is the beauty and the charm of Mr. Godwin’s descriptions that the reader identifies himself with the author; and the secret of this is, that the author has identified himself with his personages.  Indeed, he has created them.  They are the proper issue of his brain, lawfully begot, not foundlings, nor the “bastards of his art.”  He is not an indifferent, callous spectator of the scenes which he himself pourtrays, but without seeming to feel them.  There is no look of patch-work and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of borrowed wealth; no tracery-work from worm-eaten manuscripts, from forgotten chronicles, nor piecing out of vague traditions with fragments and snatches of old ballads, so that the result resembles a gaudy, staring transparency, in which you cannot distinguish the daubing of the painter from the light that shines through the flimsy colours and gives them brilliancy.  Here all is clearly made out with strokes of the pencil, by fair, not by factitious means.  Our author takes a given subject from nature or from books, and then fills it up with the ardent workings of his own mind, with the teeming and audible pulses of his own heart.