pathy to his fellow-beings. The man who
can command the affection of others, and enter into their emotions, must
know how to feel himself. It was for more than his intellect that he was
loved by men like Holcroft and Josiah Wedgwood, like Coleridge and Lamb,
and that he was sought after by beautiful and clever women. His talents
alone would not have won the hearts of young men, and yet he invariably
made friends with those who came under his influence. Willis Webb and
Thomas Cooper, who, in his earlier London life, lived with him as pupils,
not only respected but loved him, and gave him their confidence. In a
later generation, youthful enthusiasts, of whom Bulwer and Shelley are
the most notable, looked upon Godwin as the chief apostle in the cause of
humanity, and, beginning by admiring him as a philosopher, finished by
loving him as a man. Those who know him only through his works or by
reading his biography, cannot altogether understand how it was that he
thus attracted and held the affections of so many men and women. But the
truth is that, while Godwin was naturally a man of an uncommonly cold
temperament, much of his emotional insensibility was artificially
produced by his puritanical training. He was perfectly honest when in his
philosophy of life he banished the passions from his calculations. He was
so thoroughly schooled in stifling emotion and its expression, that he
thought himself incapable of passional excitement, and, reasoning from
his own experience, failed to appreciate its importance in shaping the
course of human affairs. But it may be that people brought into personal
contact with him felt that beneath his passive exterior there was at
least the possibility of passion. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first to
develop this possibility into certainty, and to arouse Godwin to a
consciousness of its existence. She revolutionized not only his life, but
his social doctrines. Through her he discovered the flaw in his
arguments, and then honestly confessed his mistake to the world. A few
years after her death he wrote in the Introduction to "St. Leon:"--

"... I think it necessary to say on the present occasion ... that
for more than four years I have been anxious for opportunity and
leisure to modify some of the earlier chapters of that work
["Political Justice"] in conformity to the sentiments inculcated in
this. Not that I see cause to make any change respecting the
principle of