“Williams, you have conquered!  I see too late the greatness and elevation of your mind.  I confess that it is to my fault and not yours that I owe my ruin ...  I am the most execrable of all villains...  As reputation was the blood that warmed my heart, so I feel that death and infamy must seize me together.”

Three days later Falkland dies, but instead of experiencing relief at the death of his persecutor, Williams becomes the victim of remorse, regarding himself as the murderer of a noble spirit, who had been inevitably ruined by the corruption of human society: 

“Thou imbibedst the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth, and the base and low-minded envy that met thee on thy return to thy native seats, operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness.”

At the conclusion of the story, Godwin has not succeeded in making his moral very clear.  The “wicked aristocrat” who figures in the preface as “carrying into private life the execrable principles of kings and ministers” emerges at last almost as a saintly figure, who through a false notion of honour has unfortunately become the victim of a brutal squire.  But, if the story does not “rouse men to a sense of the evils of slavery,” or “constitute an epoch in the mind of every reader,” it has compensating merits and may be read with unfailing interest either as a study of morbid psychology or as a spirited detective story.  Godwin’s originality in his dissection of human motive has hardly yet been sufficiently emphasised, perhaps because he is so scrupulous in acknowledging literary debts.[78] From Mrs. Radcliffe, whose Romance of the Forest was published the year before Caleb Williams, he borrowed the mysterious chest, the nature of whose contents is hinted at but never actually disclosed; but Godwin was no wizard, and had neither the gift nor the inclination to conjure with Gothic properties.  In leaving imperfectly explained the incident of the discovery of the heart in The Monastery, Scott shielded himself behind Godwin’s Iron Chest, which gave its name to Colman’s drama.[79] Godwin’s peculiar interest was in criminal psychology, and he concentrates on the dramatic conflict between the murderer and the detective.  An unusual turn is given to the story by the fact that the criminal is the pursuer instead of the pursued.  Godwin intended later in life to write a romance based on the story of Eugene Aram, the philosophical murderer; and his careful notes on the scheme are said to have been utilised by his friend, Bulwer Lytton, in his novel of that name.[80] Caleb Williams helped to popularise the criminal in fiction, and Paul Clifford, the story of the chivalrous highwayman, is one of its literary descendants.