husiastic prose of a divine justly respected by earnest men, who
with a limited horizon fulfilled their daily duties in the city. It ends
in the rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sang
to soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope passes from the
confident expectation of instant change, through the sobrieties of
disillusionment and the recantations of despair, to the iridescent
dreams of a future which has taken wing and made its home in a fairy
world.

In 1789 when Dr. Price preached to his ardent congregation of
Nonconformist Radicals in the meeting-house at the Old Jewry, the
prospect was definite and the place of the millennium was merely the
England over which George III. ruled. The hope was a robust but
pedestrian "mental traveller," and its limbs wore the precise garments
of political formulae. It looked for honest Parliaments and manhood
suffrage, for the triumph of democracy and the abolition of war. Its
scene as Wordsworth put it, was

Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where,
But in the very world which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all.

The impetus of its own aspiration carried it swiftly beyond the prosaic
demand for Parliamentary Reform. It evolved its programme for the
reconstruction of all human institutions, and projected the amendment of
human nature itself. America had made an end of kings and France was in
the full tide of revolution. Nothing was too mighty for this
new-begotten hope, and the path to human perfectibility stretched as
plain as the narrow road to Bunyan's Heavenly City.

There followed the phase when persecution from alarmed defenders of
things as they are, disgust at the failures of the revolution in France,
and contempt for the futilities of the revolution at home, drove the new
movement into as many refuges as its votaries had temperaments. For some
there was cynicism, for others recantation. "The French Revolution" as
Hazlitt put it, "was the only match that ever took place between
philosophy and experience; and waking from the trance of theory we hear
the words Truth, Reason, Virtue, Liberty, with the same indifference or
contempt that a cynic who has married a jilt or a termagant listens to
the rhapsodies of lovers." Godwin found his own alluring by-way, and
turning away at once from political repression and political agitation,
be