The aim of St. Leon:  A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, is to show that “boundless wealth, freedom from disease, weakness and death are as nothing in the scale against domestic affection and the charities of private life."[82] For four years Godwin had desired to modify what he had said on the subject of private affections in Political Justice, while he asserted his conviction of the general truth of his system.  Godwin had argued that private affections resulted in partiality, and therefore injustice.[83] If a house were on fire, reason would urge a man to save Fenelon in preference to his valet; but if the rescuer chanced to be the brother or father of the valet, private feeling would intervene, unreasonably urging him to save his relative and abandon Fenelon.  Lest he should be regarded as a wrecker of homes, Godwin wished to show that domestic happiness should not be despised by the man of reason.  Instead of expressing his views on this subject in a succinct pamphlet, Godwin, elated by the success of Caleb Williams, decided to embody them in the form of a novel.  He at first despaired of finding a theme so rich in interest as that of his first novel, but ultimately decided that “by mixing human feelings and passions with incredible situations he might conciliate the patience even of the severest judges."[84] The phrase, “mixing human feelings,” betrays in a flash Godwin’s mechanical method of constructing a story.  He makes no pretence that St. Leon grew naturally as a work of art.  He imposed upon himself an unsuitable task, and, though he doggedly accomplished it, the result is dull and laboured.

The plot of St. Leon was suggested by Dr. John Campbell’s Hermippus Redivivus,[85] and centres round the theories of the Rosicrucians.  The first volume describes the early life of the knight St. Leon, his soldiering, his dissipations, and his happy marriage to Marguerite, whose character is said to have been modelled on that of Mary Wollstonecraft.  In Paris he is tempted into extravagance and into playing for high stakes, with the result that he retires to Switzerland the “prey of poverty and remorse.”  Misfortunes pursue him for some time, but he at last enjoys six peaceful years, at the end of which he is visited by a mysterious old man, whom he conceals in a summer-house, and whom he refuses to betray to the Inquisitors in search of him.  In return the old man reveals to him the secret of the elixir vitae, and of the philosopher’s stone.  Marguerite becomes suspicious of the source of her husband’s wealth:  “For a soldier you present me with a projector and a chemist, a cold-blooded mortal raking in the ashes of a crucible for a selfish and solitary advantage.”  His son, Charles, unable to endure the aspersions cast upon his father’s honour during their travels together in Germany, deserts him.  St. Leon is imprisoned because he cannot account for the death of the stranger and for his own sudden acquisition of wealth, but contrives his