to await its philosopher in John Stuart Mill. The happy
marriage ended abruptly and tragically. On August 30, 1797, was born the
child Mary, who was to become Shelley's wife, and carry on in a second
generation her parents' tradition of fearless love and revolutionary
hope. Ten days after the birth, the mother died in spite of all that the
devotion of her husband and the skill of his medical friends could do
to save her. A few broken-hearted letters are left to record Godwin's
agony of mind.

* * * * *

With the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, ended all that was happy
and stimulating in Godwin's career. It was for him the year of private
disaster, and from it he dated also the triumph of the reaction in
England. The stimulus of the revolutionary period was withdrawn. He
lived no longer among ardent spirits who would brave everything and do
anything for human perfectibility. Some were in Botany Bay, and others,
like the indomitable Holcroft, were absorbed in the struggle to live,
with the handicap of political persecution against them. Godwin, indeed,
never fell into despair over the ruin of his political hopes. Like
Beethoven he revered Napoleon, at all events until he assumed the title
of Emperor, and would console himself with the conviction that this
"auspicious and beneficent genius" had "without violence to the
principles of the French Revolution ... suspended their morbid
activity," while preserving "all the great points" of its doctrine. But
while all England hung on the event of the titanic struggle against
this "beneficent genius," what was a philanthropist to do? The world was
rattling back into barbarism, and the generation which emerged from the
long nightmare of war, famine, and repression, was incomparably less
advanced in its thinking, narrower and timider in its whole habit of
mind than the men who were young in 1789. There was nothing to do, and a
philosopher whose only weapon was argument, kept silence when none would
listen. Of what use to talk of "peace and the powers of the human mind,"
while all England was gloating over the brutal cartoons of Gillray, and
trying on the volunteer uniforms, in which it hoped to repel Napoleon's
invasion? We need not wonder that Godwin's output of philosophic writing
practically ceased with the eighteenth century. He was henceforth a man
without a purpose, who wrote for bread and renounced the exercise of his
greater powers.

T