The poverty and hardship, in which he had been trained from childhood till he dropt the title of ‘Reverend’ and determined to live honestly by the pen instead of living dishonestly by the pulpit, were serviceable to the booksellers’ hack, whom they had taught how to live with comfort and contentment on a precarious number of weekly shillings. The young man, who dined sufficiently well on a chop and potato, and conceived himself to have dined luxuriously after consuming a large beefsteak and a pint of porter, had in some respects the advantage of literary competitors, who together with higher culture had acquired at Oxford or Cambridge a taste for higher living. On approaching middle life he could, however, have afforded to relinquish the frugal habits formed during his early struggles. The persevering hack, who steadily prosecuted various studies whilst toiling for the publishers; the religious inquirer, who passed through Socinianism on his way from Calvinism to Deism; the resolute Radical, who sought the justification of his political sentiments in philosophical principles, whilst living in close friendship with Thomas Holcroft, and cordial good fellowship with Thomas Paine, was a man, certain to achieve eminence sooner or later in the republic of letters. If it came to him less than soon, celebrity came to Godwin none too late for its perfect enjoyment. He was still in his thirty-eighth year, when he published _Political Justice_,--the work for which Robinson is said to have paid him, at different times, sums amounting to a thousand guineas; the work that made him famous as a teacher of philosophical Radicalism. If it made him the best-abused man of the three kingdoms, this daring and in some respects superlatively unsound book rendered him the idol of political enthusiasts in every quarter of the country. Unalluring in design, repellent in style, usually guarded in expression, sold at a price that kept it from the hands of the multitude whom it was intended chiefly to benefit, the frigid and passionless work, whose principles could not fail to make it regarded with disfavour by the majority of the wealthier class, possessed no feature or quality, apart from its attractive title, its aims and its general audacity, to humour the popular taste and win popular applause. For such a work shrewd judges of the book-market might well have predicted commercial failure. It was, however, successful from every point of view. Successful for its immediate and later effect on the readers it was especially intended to influence, it was fortunate in a sale that exceeded the anticipations of author and publisher, and fortunate in the determination of the Government to take no measures to check its circulation.