he end of Godwin's active apostolic life is clearly marked in a
pamphlet which he issued in 1801 ("Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of
Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April 15, 1800,
being a reply to the attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the author
[Malthus] of the _Essay on Population_ and others"). It is a masterly
piece of writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on the
shelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I remember
few passages in ancient or modern authors that contain more just
philosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the fine
following pages. They reflect equal honour on Godwin's head and heart.
Though I did it in the zenith of his reputation, yet I feel remorse even
to have only spoken unkindly of such a man.--S. T. C."

Godwin tells how the reaction burst over him, and he dates it from 1797:
"After having for four years heard little else than the voice of
commendation, I was at length attacked from every side, and in a style
which defied all moderation and decency.... The cry spread like a
general infection, and I have been told that not even a petty novel for
boarding-school misses now ventures to aspire to favour unless it
contains some expression of dislike or abhorrence to the new
philosophy." Some of the attacks were scurrilous and all of them
proceeded on the common assumption of the defenders of authority in all
ages and nations, that the man who would innovate in morals is himself
immoral.

He goes on to sketch the present case of the revolutionary party: "The
societies have perished, or where they have not, have shrunk to a
skeleton; the days of democratical declamation are no more; even the
starving labourer in the alehouse is become the champion of
aristocracy.... Jacobinism was destroyed; its party as a party was
extinguished; its tenets were involved in almost universal unpopularity
and odium; they were deserted by almost every man high or low in the
island of Great Britain." Even the young Pantisocrats had gone over to
the enemy, and Wordsworth, grave and disillusionised, tried to forget
that he had ever exhorted his fellow-students to burn their books and
"read Godwin on Necessity." The defection of Dr. Parr and Mackintosh was
symptomatic. Both had been Godwin's personal friends, and both of them
had hailed the new philosophy. No one remembers them to-day, but they
were in their time intellectual oracles. The schola