The Spirit of the Age was never more fully-shewn than in its treatment
of this writer--its love of paradox and change, its dastard submission
to prejudice and to the fashion of the day. Five-and-twenty years ago he
was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed
as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one 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:--now he has sunk below the
horizon, and enjoys the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. Mr.
Godwin, during his lifetime, has secured to himself the triumphs and the
mortifications of an extreme notoriety and of a sort of posthumous fame.

His bark, after being tossed in the revolutionary tempest, now raised to
heaven by all the fury of popular breath, now almost dashed in pieces,
and buried in the quicksands of ignorance, or scorched with the
lightning of momentary indignation, at length floats on the calm wave
that is to bear it down the stream of time. Mr. Godwin's person is not
known, he is not pointed out in the street, his conversation is not
courted, his opinions are not asked, he is at the head of no cabal, he
belongs to no party in the State, he has no train of admirers, no
one thinks it worth his while even to traduce and vilify him, he has
scarcely friend or foe, the world make a point (as Goldsmith used to
say) of taking no more notice of him than if such an individual had
never existed; he is to all ordinary intents and purposes dead and
buried; but the author of _Political Justice_ and of _Caleb Williams_
can never die, his name is an abstraction in letters, his works are
standard in the history of intellect. He is thought of now like any
eminent writer a hundred-and-fifty years ago, or just as he will be
a hundred-and-fifty years hence. He knows this, and smiles in silent