to as a discoverer in social science—­produced an immense effect on impressionable minds at the time.  All who prized liberty, sympathised with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist.  “No one,” said a contemporary, “was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.”  Young graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional studies to dream of “the renovation of society and the march of mind.”  Godwin carried with him “all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time.” [Footnote:  Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age:  article on Godwin (written in 1814).]

The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and afterwards Shelley.  Wordsworth had been an ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution.  In its early days he had visited Paris: 

         An emporium then
   Of golden expectations and receiving
   Freights every day from a new world of hope.

He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith in Revolutionary France.  Southey, who had come under the influence of Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin’s theories, and in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a “pantisocratic” settlement in America, to show how happiness could be realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and consequently all are virtuous.  The plan anticipated the experiments of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carried out.  Coleridge and Southey as well as Wordsworth soon abandoned their Godwinian doctrines. [Footnote:  In letters of 1797 and 1798 Coleridge repudiated the French doctrines and Godwin’s philosophy.  See Cestre, La Revolution francaise et les poetes anglais (1789-1809), pp. 389, 414.] They had, to use a phrase of Hazlitt, lost their way in Utopia, and they gave up the abstract and mechanical view of society which the French philosophy of the eighteenth century taught, for an organic conception in which historic sentiment and the wisdom of our ancestors had their due place.  Wordsworth could presently look back and criticise his Godwinian phase as that of

  A proud and most presumptuous confidence
   In the transcendent wisdom of the age
   And its discernment. [Footnote:  Excursion, Book ii.]

He and Southey became conservative pillars of the state.  Yet Southey, reactionary as he was in politics, never ceased to believe in social Progress. [Footnote:  See his Colloquies; and Shelley, writing in 1811, says that Southey “looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind” (Dowden, Life of Shelley, i. p. 212).  Compare below, p. 325.] Amelioration was indeed to be effected by slow and cautious reforms, with the aid of the Church, but the intellectual aberrations of his youth had left an abiding impression.