“He was more than six feet in stature ... and he was built as if it had been a colossus, destined to sustain the weight of the starry heavens.  His voice was like thunder ... his head and chin were clothed with a thick and shaggy hair, in colour a dead-black.  He had suffered considerable mutilation in the services through which he had passed ...  Bethlem Gabor, though universally respected for the honour and magnanimity of a soldier, was not less remarkable for habits of reserve and taciturnity...  Seldom did he allow himself to open his thoughts but when he did, Great God! what supernatural eloquence seemed to inspire and enshroud him...  Bethlem Gabor’s was a soul that soared to a sightless distance above the sphere of pity."[87]

The superstitions of bygone ages, which had fired the imagination of so many writers of romance, left Godwin cold.  He was mildly interested in the supernatural as affording insight into the “credulity of the human mind,” and even compiled a treatise on The Lives of the Necromancers (1834).[88] But the hints and suggestions, the gloom, the weird lights and shades which help to create that romantic atmosphere amid which the alchemist’s dream seems possible of realisation are entirely lacking in Godwin’s story.  He displays everything in a high light.  The transference of the gifts takes place not in the darkness of a subterranean vault, but in the calm light of a summer evening.  No unearthly groans, no phosphorescent lights enhance the horror and mystery of the scene.  Godwin is coolly indifferent to historical accuracy, and fails to transport us back far beyond the end of the eighteenth century.  Rousseau’s theories were apparently disseminated widely in 1525. St. Leon is remembered now rather for its position in the history of the novel than for any intrinsic charm.  Godwin was the first to embody in a romance the ideas of the Rosicrucians which inspired Bulwer Lytton’s Zicci, Zanoni and A Strange Story.

St. Leon was travestied, the year after it appeared, in a work called St. Godwin:  A Tale of the 16th, 17th and 18th Century, by “Count Reginald de St. Leon,” which gives a scathing survey of the plot, with all its improbabilities exposed.  The bombastic style of St. Leon is imitated and only slightly exaggerated, and the author finally satirises Godwin bitterly: 

“Thinking from my political writings that I was a good hand at fiction, I turned my thoughts to novel-writing.  These I wrote in the same pompous, inflated style as I had used in my other publications, hoping that my fine high-sounding periods would assist to make the unsuspecting reader swallow all the insidious reasoning, absurdity and nonsense I could invent."[89]

The parodist takes Godwin almost as seriously as he took himself, and his attack is needlessly savage.  Godwin’s political opinions may account for the brutality of his assailant who doubtless belonged to the other camp.  When Godwin attempts the supernatural in his other novels, he always fails to create an atmosphere of mystery.  The apparition in Cloudesley appears, fades, and reappears in a manner so undignified as to remind us of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland: