This Johnson was a remarkable man. His sympathies were with rebels, whom he detected, welcomed, and encouraged. But he had none of the hard narrowness of advanced liberals, and his eye and heart were quick also to discover and cheer such a shy, diffident, conservative genius as Cowper. He was a friend to the authors whose works he published; and in a little upper chamber he gave weekly dinner parties, to which were bidden William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, Dr Price and Dr Priestley, and now Blake himself. In the 'eighties Blake had moved among elegant Blue-stockings who were above all things anxious to show themselves true daughters of Sarah: now in the 'nineties he was one of a party of rebels who despised the past, and were hailing the French Revolution, believing that after a few more of such upheavals a millennium would surely come in which man would be perfected. Foremost among the rebels was William Godwin. Ten years younger, Blake might have been captivated by Godwin, as later on Shelley, Coleridge, and Bulwer Lytton were to be. There was always something clean and fresh about Godwin, and his hopes and aspirations for mankind were generous. Brought up in the narrowest sect of Calvinism, and believing while still a boy that he was assuredly one of the elect, he rebounded in later life to a liberal humanism, and retained little of his Calvinism except an unshaken belief in his own election. The first edition of his _Enquiry concerning Political Justice_ appeared in 1793, which he stated all his first principles. These can be summarized briefly: The characters of men originate in their external circumstances, and therefore man has no innate ideas or principles, and no instincts of right action apart from reasoning. Heredity counts for almost nothing. It is impression makes the man. The voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions. Man is perfectible. Man has negative rights but no positive rights. Nothing further is requisite, but the improvement of his reasoning faculty, to make him virtuous and happy. Freedom of will is a curse. It is not free or independent of understanding, and therefore it follows understanding, and fortunately is not free to resist it. Man becomes free as he obeys it. It follows that our disapprobation of vice will be of the same nature as our disapprobation of an infectious distemper. A scheme of self-love is incompatible with virtue. The only means by which truth enters is through the inlet of the senses. Intellect is the creature of sensation, we have no other inlet of knowledge. Government is in all cases an evil, and it ought to be introduced as sparingly as possible. Give a state but liberty enough, and it is impossible that vice should exist in it.