that he was "the last man to recommend a
pitiful attempt by scattered examples to renovate the face of society."
He seems, indeed, to have forgotten his own happy experiment with Mary
Wollstonecraft, and protests with a vigour hardly to be expected from so
stout an individualist against the idea, that "each man for himself
should supersede and trample upon the institutions of the country in
which he lives. A thousand things might be found excellent and salutary
if brought into general practice, which would in some cases appear
ridiculous and in others attended with tragical consequences if
prematurely acted upon by a solitary individual."

On this view he acted. He forbade Shelley his house, and tried to make a
reconciliation between him and Harriet. On July 28, 1814, Mary secretly
left her father's house, joined her lover, and began with him her life
of ideal intimacy and devotion. Godwin felt and expressed the utmost
disapproval, and for two years refused to meet Shelley, until at the
close of 1816, after the suicide of the unhappy Harriet, he stood at his
daughter's side as a witness to her marriage. His public conduct was
correct. In private he continued to accept money from the erring
disciple whom he refused to meet, and salved his elderly conscience by
insisting that the cheques should be drawn in another name. There Godwin
touched the lowest depths of his moral degeneration. Let us remember,
however, that even Shelley, who saw the worst of Godwin, would never
speak of him with total condemnation. "Added years," he wrote near the
end of his life, "only add to my admiration of his intellectual powers,
and even the moral resources of his character." In the poetical epistle
to Maria Gisborne, he wrote of

"That which was Godwin--greater none than he
Though fallen, and fallen on evil times, to stand
Among the spirits of our age and land
Before the dread tribunal of To-come
The foremost, while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb."

The end came to the old man amid comparative peace and serenity. He
accepted a sinecure from the Whigs, and became a Yeoman Usher of the
Exchequer, with a small stipend and chambers in New Palace Yard. It was
a tribute as much to his harmlessness as to his merit. The work of his
last years shows little decay in his intellectual powers. _His Thoughts
on Man_ (1831) collects his fugitive essays. They are varied in subject,
suave, easy and conversational in manner, more polished in styl