his enemies as an apostle of
license, he seems to have been a rather cold-blooded person, whose one
passion for Mary Wollstonecraft was at least as much an affair of the
head as of the heart. He was decidedly vain, and as decidedly priggish;
but the worst thing about him was his tendency to "sponge"--a tendency
which he indulged not merely on his generous son-in-law Shelley, but on
almost everybody with whom he came in contact. It is, however, fair to
admit that this tendency (which was probably a legacy of the patronage
system) was very wide-spread at the time; that the mighty genius of
Coleridge succumbed to it to a worse extent even than Godwin did; and
that Southey himself, who for general uprightness and independence has
no superior in literary history, was content for years to live upon the
liberality not merely of an uncle, but of a school comrade, in a way
which in our own days would probably make men of not half his moral
worth seriously uncomfortable.

Estimates of the strictly formal excellence of Godwin's writing have
differed rather remarkably. To take two only, his most recent
biographer, Mr. Kegan Paul, is never weary of praising the "beauty" of
Godwin's style; while Scott, a very competent and certainly not a very
savage critic, speaks of the style of the Chaucer as "uncommonly
depraved, exhibiting the opposite defects of meanness and of bombast."
This last is too severe; but I am unable often to see the great beauty,
the charm, and so forth, which Godwin's admirers have found in his
writings. He shows perhaps at his best in this respect in _St. Leon_,
where there are some passages of a rather artificial, but solemn and
grandiose beauty; and he can seldom be refused the praise of a capable
and easily wielded fashion of writing, equally adapted to exposition,
description, and argument. But that Godwin's taste and style were by no
means impeccable is proved by his elaborate essay on the subject in the
_Enquirer_, where he endeavours to show that the progress of English
prose-writing had been one of unbroken improvement since the time of
Queen Elizabeth, and pours contempt on passages of Shakespeare and
others where more catholic appreciation could not fail to see the
beauty. In practice his special characteristic, which Scott (or Jeffrey,
for the criticism appeared in the _Edinburgh_) selected for special
reprobation in the context of the passage quoted above, was the
accumulation of short sentences, very