The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits | Page 8

a metre
in Virgil. He was afterwards at the University, and he has described the
scruples of an ingenuous youthful mind about subscribing the articles,
in a passage in his _Church-of-Englandism_, which smacks of truth
and honour both, and does one good to read it in an age, when "to be
honest" (or not to laugh at the very idea of honesty) "is to be one man
picked out of ten thousand!" Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes,
after the fatigue of study, by playing on a fine old organ, and has a
relish for Hogarth's prints. He turns wooden utensils in a lathe for
exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner. He has no
great fondness for poetry, and can hardly extract a moral out of
Shakespear. His house is warmed and lighted by steam. He is one of
those who prefer the artificial to the natural in most things, and think
the mind of man omnipotent. He has a great contempt for out-of-door

prospects, for green fields and trees, and is for referring every thing to
Utility. There is a little narrowness in this; for if all the sources of
satisfaction are taken away, what is to become of utility itself? It is,
indeed, the great fault of this able and extraordinary man, that he has
concentrated his faculties and feelings too entirely on one subject and
pursuit, and has not "looked enough abroad into universality."[B]
[Footnote A: Now Lord Colchester.]
[Footnote B: Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning.]

* * * * *

WILLIAM GODWIN

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 mockery of himself,
reposing on the monument of his fame--
"Sedet, in eternumque sedebit infelix Theseus."
No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the
country as the celebrated Enquiry concerning Political Justice. Tom
Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old
woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist. Truth, moral truth, it was
supposed, had here taken up its abode; and these were the oracles of
thought. "Throw aside your books of chemistry," said Wordsworth to a
young man, a student in the Temple, "and read Godwin on Necessity."
Sad necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at
twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below
zero in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense!
Let us pause here a little.--Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions,
and carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings
of the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged,
were they therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our
idolatry all of a sudden to become an