whole time and attention to, and wisely writes over the doors of his understanding, his fancy, and his senses—­“No admittance except on business.”  He has none of that fastidious refinement and false delicacy, which might lead him to balance between the endless variety of modern attainments.  He does not throw away his life (nor a single half-hour of it) in adjusting the claims of different accomplishments, and in choosing between them or making himself master of them all.  He sets about his task, (whatever it may be) and goes through it with spirit and fortitude.  He has the happiness to think an author the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest author in it.  Mr. Coleridge, in writing an harmonious stanza, would stop to consider whether there was not more grace and beauty in a Pas de trois, and would not proceed till he had resolved this question by a chain of metaphysical reasoning without end.  Not so Mr. Godwin.  That is best to him, which he can do best.  He does not waste himself in vain aspirations and effeminate sympathies.  He is blind, deaf, insensible to all but the trump of Fame.  Plays, operas, painting, music, ball-rooms, wealth, fashion, titles, lords, ladies, touch him not—­all these are no more to him than to the magician in his cell, and he writes on to the end of the chapter, through good report and evil report. Pingo in eternitatem—­is his motto.  He neither envies nor admires what others are, but is contented to be what he is, and strives to do the utmost he can.  Mr. Coleridge has flirted with the Muses as with a set of mistresses:  Mr. Godwin has been married twice, to Reason and to Fancy, and has to boast no short-lived progeny by each.  So to speak, he has valves belonging to his mind, to regulate the quantity of gas admitted into it, so that like the bare, unsightly, but well-compacted steam-vessel, it cuts its liquid way, and arrives at its promised end:  while Mr. Coleridge’s bark, “taught with the little nautilus to sail,” the sport of every breath, dancing to every wave,

  “Youth at its prow, and Pleasure at its helm,”

flutters its gaudy pennons in the air, glitters in the sun, but we wait in vain to hear of its arrival in the destined harbour.  Mr. Godwin, with less variety and vividness, with less subtlety and susceptibility both of thought and feeling, has had firmer nerves, a more determined purpose, a more comprehensive grasp of his subject, and the results are as we find them.  Each has met with his reward:  for justice has, after all, been done to the pretensions of each; and we must, in all cases, use means to ends!

[Footnote A:  Mr. Coleridge named his eldest son (the writer of some beautiful Sonnets) after Hartley, and the second after Berkeley.  The third was called Derwent, after the river of that name.  Nothing can be more characteristic of his mind than this circumstance.  All his ideas indeed are like a river, flowing on for ever, and still murmuring as it flows, discharging its waters and still replenished—­