“I bent myself to the conception of a series of adventures of flight and pursuit:  the fugitive in perpetual apprehension of being overwhelmed with the worst calamities and the pursuer by his ingenuity and resources keeping the victim in a state of the most fearful alarm.  This was the project of my third volume.  I was next called upon to conceive a dramatic and impressive situation adequate to account for the impulse that the pursuer should feel incessantly to alarm and harass his victim, with an inextinguishable resolution never to allow him the least interval of peace and security.  This I apprehended could best be effected by a secret murder, to the investigation of which the innocent victim should be impelled by an unconquerable spirit of curiosity.  The murderer would thus have a sufficient motive to persecute the unhappy discoverer that he might deprive him of peace, character and credit, and have him for ever in his power.  This constituted the outline of my second volume...  To account for the fearful events of the third it was necessary that the pursuer should be invested with every advantage of fortune, with a resolution that nothing could defeat or baffle and with extraordinary resources of intellect.  Nor could my purpose of giving an overpowering interest to my tale be answered without his appearing to have been originally endowed with a mighty store of amiable dispositions and virtues, so that his being driven to the first act of murder should be judged worthy of the deepest regret, and should be seen in some measure to have arisen out of his virtues themselves.  It was necessary to make him ... the tenant of an atmosphere of romance, so that every reader should feel prompted almost to worship him for his high qualities.  Here were ample materials for a first volume."[77]

Godwin hoped that an “entire unity of plot” would be the infallible result of this ingenious method of constructing his story, and only wrote in a high state of excitement when the “afflatus” was upon him.  So far as we may judge from his description, he seems to have realised his story first as a complex psychological situation, not as a series of disconnected pictures.  He thought in abstractions not in visual images, and he had next to make his abstractions concrete by inventing figures whose actions should be the result of the mental and moral conflict he had conceived.  Godwin’s attitude to his art forms a striking contrast to that of Mrs. Radcliffe.  She has her set of marionettes, appropriately adorned, ready to move hither and thither across her picturesque background as soon as she has deftly manipulated the machinery which is to set them in motion.  Godwin, on the other hand, first constructs his machinery, and afterwards, with laborious effort, carves the figures who are to be attached to the wires.  He cares little for costume or setting, but much for the complicated mechanism that controls the destiny of his characters.  The effect of this difference