re is none more attractive. Mrs. Shelley describes him as a "man
of stern and irascible character," but he was also lovable and
affectionate. There was in his mind and will some powerful initial
force of resolve and mental independence. He thought for himself, and
yet he could assimilate the ideas of other men. He was a reasoner and a
doctrinaire; and yet he must have had in himself those untamed volcanic
emotions which we associate with the heroes of the romantic novels of
the age. He believed in the almost unlimited powers of the human mind,
and his own career, which saw his rise from stable-boy and cobbler to
dramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in their
mirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think that
perfection might have been within their reach had not their youth been
stunted by the influence of Calvin and the British Constitution.
Rectitude, courage and unflinching truth were Holcroft's ideal. He
firmly believed (an idea which lay in germ in Condorcet and was for a
time adopted by Godwin) that the will guided by reason might transform
not only the human mind but the human body. Like the Christian
Scientists of to-day he asserted, as Mrs. Shelley tells us, that "death
and disease existed only through the feebleness of man's mind, that pain
also had no reality."

He was a man of fifty when he met Godwin at thirty, and he had packed
into his half century a more various experience of men and things than
the studious and sedentary Godwin could have acquired if he had lived
the life of the Wandering Jew. Theirs was a friendship of mutual
stimulation and intimate exchange which is commoner between a man and a
woman than between two men. They met almost daily, and in spite of some
violent lovers' quarrels, their affection lasted till Holcroft's death
in 1809. It is not hard to understand their quarrels. Neither of them
had natural tact, and Godwin's sensibility was morbid. Unflinching
truthfulness, even in literary criticism, must have tried their tempers,
and the single word "demele," best translated "row," occurs often in
Godwin's diary as his note on one of their meetings. It is not easy to
decide which influenced the other more. Godwin's was the trained,
systematic, academical mind, but Holcroft added to a rich and curious
experience of life and a vein of native originality, wide reading and
something more than a mere amateur's taste for music and art. It was
Holcroft wh