It is rather curious that Godwin, who was but forty-four at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and continued to be a diligent writer as well as a publisher and bookseller till his death in 1836, his last years being made comfortable by a place under the Reform Ministry, never did anything really good after the eighteenth century had closed. His tragedy _Antonio_ only deserves remembrance because of Lamb's exquisite account of its damnation. His _Life of Chaucer_ (1801) was one of the earliest examples of that style of padding and guesswork in literary biography with which literature has been flooded since. His later novels--_Fleetwood_, _Mandeville_, _Cloudesley_, etc.--are far inferior to _Caleb Williams_ (1794) and _St. Leon_ (1799). His _Treatise of Population_ (1820), in answer to Malthus, was belated and ineffective; and his _History of the Commonwealth_, in four volumes, though a very respectable compilation, is nothing more. Godwin's character was peculiar, and cannot be said to be pleasing. Though regarded (or at least described) by 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.