the most meaning I ever saw.... As for Godwin himself he has
large noble eyes and a _nose_--oh, most abominable nose. Language is not
vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation."
Godwin, if one may trust the portrait by Northcote, had impressive if
not exactly handsome features. The head is shapely, the brow ample, the
nose decidedly too long, the shaven lips and chin finely chiselled. The
whole suggestion is of a character self-absorbed and contemplative. He
was short and sturdy in build, and in his sober dress and grave
deportments, suggested rather the dissenting preacher than the prophet
of philosophic anarchism. He was not a ready debater or a fluent talker.
His genius was not spontaneous or intuitive. It was rather an elaborate
effort of the will, which deliberately used the fruits of his
accumulative study and incessant activity of mind. He resembled, says
Hazlitt, who admired and liked him, "an eight-day clock that must be
wound up long before it can strike. He is ready only on reflection:
dangerous only at the rebound. He gathers himself up, and strains every
nerve and faculty with deliberate aim to some heroic and dazzling
achievement of intellect; but he must make a career before he flings
himself armed upon the enemy, or he is sure to be unhorsed."

No two minds could have presented a greater contrast. Had Mary
Wollstonecraft lived they must have moulded each other into something
finer than Nature had made of either. The year of married life was
ideally happy, and the strange experiment in reconciling individualism
with love apparently succeeded. Mrs. Godwin, for all her revolutionary
independence, leaned affectionately on her husband, and he, in spite of
his rather overgrown self-esteem, regarded her with reverence and pride.
She was quick in her affections and resentments, but looking back many
years later Godwin declares that they were "as happy as is permitted to
human beings." "It must be remembered, however, that I honoured her
intellectual powers and the nobleness and generosity of her
propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce
the happiness we experienced."

Godwin's novels suggest that, on the whole, he shared her views about
women, though in a later essay (on "Friendship," in _Thoughts on Man_),
there are some passages which suggest a less perfect understanding. But
he never used his pen to carry on her work, and the emancipation of
women had