It is questionable how far the world has to thank Godwin for dissuading ardent young men from any practical effort to realise their ideals. It is just conceivable that, if the generation which hailed him as prophet had been stimulated by him to do something more than fold its hands in an almost superstitious veneration for the Slow Approach of Truth, there might have arisen under educated leaders some movement less class-bound than Whig Reform, less limited than the Corn Law agitation, and more intelligent than Chartism. But, if politics lost by Godwin's quietism, literature gained. It was Godwin's mission in life to save poets from Botany Bay; he rescued Shelley, as he had rescued Southey and Coleridge. It was by scattering his pity and his sympathy on every living creature around him, and squandering his fortune and his expectations in charity, while he dodged the duns and lived on bread and tea, that Shelley followed in action the principles of universal benevolence. Godwin omitted the beasts; but Shelley, practising vegetarianism and buying crayfish in order to return them to the river, realised the "boast" of the poet in Alastor:—

If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred—

We hear of his gifts of blankets to the poor lace-makers at Marlow, and meet him stumbling home barefoot in mid-winter because he had given his boots to a poor woman.

Perhaps the most characteristic picture of this aspect of Shelley is Leigh Hunt's anecdote of a scene on Hampstead Heath. Finding a poor woman in a fit on the top of the Heath, Shelley carries her in his arms to the lighted door of the nearest house, and begs for shelter. The householder slams it in his face, with an "impostors swarm everywhere," and a "Sir, your conduct is extraordinary."

"Sir," cried Shelley, "I am sorry to say that your conduct is not extraordinary.... It is such men as you who madden the spirits and the patience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes in this country (which is very probable), recollect what I tell you. You will have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head."

It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quite content to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen) decided that the Shelley who carried this poor stranger into shelter, fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need, was unfit to bring up his own children.

If Shelley allowed himself to be persuaded by Godwin to abandon his missionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether by Platonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moves half-consciously from the Godwinian notion that mankind are to be reasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him the first stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. "My purpose," he writes in the preface to Prometheus, "has been ... to familiarise ... poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness." It was for want of virtue, as Mary Wollstonecraft reflected, writing sadly after the Terror, that the French Revolution had failed. The lesson of all the horrors of oppression and reaction which Shelley described, the comfort of all the listening spirits who watch from their mental eyries the slow progress of mankind to perfection, the example of martyred patriots—these tend always to the moral which Demogorgon sums up at the end of the unflagging, unearthly beauties of the last triumphant act of Prometheus Unbound:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

To suffer, to forgive, to love, but above all, to defy—that was for Shelley the whole duty of man.

In two peculiarities, which he constantly emphasised, Shelley's view of progress differed at once from Godwin's conception, and from the notion of a slow evolutionary growth which the men of to-day consider historical he traced the impulse which is to lead mankind to perfection, to the magnetic leading of chosen and consecrated spirits. He saw the process of change not as a slow evolution (as moderns do), nor yet as the deliberate discarding of error at the bidding of rational argument (as Godwin did), but rather as a sudden emotional conversion. The missionary is always the light-bringer. "Some eminent in virtue shall start up," he prophesies in Queen Mab. The Revolt of Islam, so puzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of its mythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable race of men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epic of revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in that elaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or after Shelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free their countrymen comes to Laon and Cythna while they are still children, brooding over the slavery of modern Greece amid the ruins of a free past. They dream neither of teaching nor of fighting. They are the winged children of Justice and Truth, whose mere words can scatter the thrones of the oppressor, and trample the last altar in the dust. It is enough to speak the name of Liberty in a ship at sea, and all the coasts around it will thrill with the rumour of her name. In one moving, eloquent harangue, Cythna converts the sailors of the ship, laden with slaves and the gains of commerce, into the pioneers of her army. She paints to them the misery of their own lot, and then appeals to the central article of revolutionary faith:

This need not be; ye might arise and will That gold should lose its power and thrones their glory. That love which none may bind be free to fill The world like light; and evil faith, grown hoary With crime, be quenched and die.

"Ye might arise and will"—it was the inevitable corollary of the facile analysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature," but to kings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of liberty preach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Army preach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the same mesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and the history of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power as instructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because men are incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will," but rather because to render its effects permanent, it must proceed to regiment the converts in organised associations, which speedily develop all the evils that have ruined the despotism it set out to overthrow.

The interest of this revolutionary epic lies largely in the marriage of Godwin's ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft's, which in the second generation bears its full imaginative fruit. The most eloquent verses are those which describe Cythna's leadership of the women in the national revolt, and enforce the theme "Can man be free, if woman be a slave?" Not less characteristic is the Godwinian abhorrence of violence, and the Godwinian trust in the magic of courageous passivity. Laon finds the revolutionary hosts about to slaughter their vanquished oppressors, and persuades them to mercy and fraternity with the appeal.

O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill And pain still keener pain for ever breed.

He pardons and spares the tyrant himself; and Cythna shames the slaves who are sent to bind her, until they weep in a sudden perception of the beauty of virtue and courage. When the reaction breaks at length upon the victorious liberators, they stand passive to be hewn down, as Shelley, in the Masque of Anarchy, written after Peterloo, advised the English reformers to do.

With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear and less surprise, Look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame To the place from which they came, And the blood thus shed will speak In hot blushes on their cheek.

The simple stanzas might have been written by Blake. There is something in the primitive Christianity of this aggressive Atheist which breathes the childlike innocence of the Kingdom of Heaven. Shelley dreamed of "a nation made free by love." With a strange mystical insight, he stepped beyond the range of the Godwinian ethics, when he conceived of his humane missionaries as victims who offer themselves a living sacrifice for the redemption of mankind. Prometheus chained to his rock, because he loved and defied, by some inscrutable magic of destiny, brings at last by his calm endurance the consummation of the Golden Age. Laon walks voluntarily on to the pile which the Spanish inquisitor had heaped for him; and Cythna flings herself upon the flames in a last affirmation of the power of self-sacrifice and the beauty of comradeship.

Thrice Shelley essayed to paint the state of perfection which mankind might attain, when once it should "arise and will." The first of the three pictures is the most literally Godwinian. It is the boyish sketch of Queen Mab, with pantisocracy faithfully touched in, and Godwin's speculations on the improvement of the human frame suggested in a few pregnant lines. One does not feel that Shelley's mind is even yet its own master in the firmer and maturer picture which concludes the third act of Prometheus Unbound. He is still repeating a lesson, and it calls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture of perfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius of the poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act to sing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb in eternity," while they circle in lyrical joy around the liberated earth. There sings Shelley. The picture itself is a faithful illustration etched with a skilful needle to adorn the last chapter of Political Justice. Evil is once more and always something factitious and unessential. The Spirit of the Earth sees the "ugly human shapes and visages" which men had worn in the old bad days float away through the air like chaff on the wind. They were no more than masks. Thrones are kingless, and forthwith men walk in upright equality, neither fawning nor trembling. Republican sincerity informs their speech:

None talked that common false cold hollow talk Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes.

Women are "changed to all they dared not be," and "speak the wisdom once they could not think." "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons," and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" cumber the ground like the unnoticed ruins of a barbaric past.

The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless.

The story ends there, and if we do not so much as wait for the assurance that man passionless, tribeless, and nationless lived happily ever afterwards, it is because we are unable to feel even this faint interest in his destiny. There is something amiss with an ideal which is constrained to express itself in negatives. What should be the climax of a triumphant argument becomes its refutation. To reduce ourselves to this abstract quintessential man might be euthanasia. It would not be paradise.

The third of Shelley's visions of perfection is the climax of Hellas. One feels in attempting to make about Hellas any statement in bald prose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mind experiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the critics have written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the page wondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. The insistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess your brain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find a channel of sense, has a power which defies the analytic understanding. Hellas, in a sense, is absolute poetry, as the "Eroica" is absolute music. Ponder a few lines in one of the choruses which seem to convey a definite idea, and against your will the elaborate rhythms and rhymes will carry you along, until thought ceases and only the music and the picture hold your imagination.

And yet Shelley meant something as certainly as Beethoven did. Nowhere is his genius so realistic, so closely in touch with contemporary fact, yet nowhere does he soar so easily into his own ideal world. He conceived it while Mavrocordato, about to start to fight for the liberation of Greece, was paying daily visits to Shelley's circle at Pisa. The events in Turkey, now awful, now hopeful, were before him as crude facts in the newspaper. The historians of classical Greece were his continual study. As he steeped himself in Plato, a world of ideal forms opened before him in a timeless heaven as real as history, as actual as the newspapers. Hellas is the vision of a mind which touches fact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into an immortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in one glowing symphony. The Sultan is no more real than Xerxes, and the golden consummation glitters with a splendour as dazzling and as present as the Age of Pericles. For Shelley, this denial of time had become a conscious doctrine. Berkeley and Plato had become for him in his later years influences as intimate as Godwin. Again and again in his later poems, he turns from the cruelties and disappointments of the world, from death and decay and failure, no longer with revolt and anger, but with a serene contempt. Thought is the only reality; time with its appearance of mortality is the dream and the illusion. Says Ahasuerus in Hellas:

The future and the past are idle shadows Of thought's eternal flight.

The moral rings out at the end of "The Sensitive Plant" with an almost conversational simplicity;

Death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in Adonais:

'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

and again:

The One remains, the many change and pass. Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity.

In all the musical and visionary glory of Hellas we seem to hear a subtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in a dogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like a prayer. At one moment Shelley toys with the dreary sublimity of the Stoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followed its destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in the secular blaze, which became for mediaeval Christianity the Dies irae. And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its own history again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity. That nightmare haunts Shelley in Hellas:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the "motto" of a symphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:

The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn. Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from his lips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the most spontaneous stanzas in our language:

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far.

He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, of Orpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:

O write no more the tale of Troy If earth Death's scroll must be, Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free.

He has turned from the empty abstraction of the Godwinian vision of perfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But his imagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had driven history out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole, complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge upon the victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longer tribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future; but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it. That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:

Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind. The foul cubs like their parents are, Their den is in their guilty mind, And conscience feeds them with despair.

Some end there must be to the perpetuum mobile of wrong and revenge. And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion. He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity of evil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?

O cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past O might it die, or rest at last.

Never were there simpler verses in a great song. But he were a bold man who would pretend to know quite certainly what they mean. Shelley is not sure whether his vision of perfection will be embodied in the earth. For a moment he seems to hope that Greece will renew her glories. For one fleeting instant—how ironical the vision seems to us—he conceives that she may be re-incarnated in America. But there is a deeper doubt than this in the prophet's mind. He is not sure that he wants to see the Golden Age founded anew in the perilous world of fact. There is a pattern of the perfect society laid up in Heaven, or if that phrase by familiarity has lost its meaning, let us say rather that the Republic exists firmly founded in the human mind itself:

But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity.

Again, and yet again, he tells us that the heavenly city, the New Athens, "the kingless continents, sinless as Eden" shine in no common day, beside no earthly sea:

If Greece must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble, And build themselves impregnably In a diviner clime, To Amphionic music on some cape sublime Which frowns above the idle foam of Time.

Is it only an eloquent phrase, which satisfies us, by its beautiful words, we know not why, as the chords that make the "full close" in music content us? Or shall we re-interpret it in our own prose? Where any mind strives after justice, where any soul suffers and loves and defies, there is the ideal Republic.

* * * * *

We have moved from Dr. Price's sermon to Shelley's chorus. The eloquent old man, preaching in the first flush of hope that came with the new time, conceived that his eyes had seen the great salvation. The day of tyrants and priests was already over, and before the earth closed on his grave, a free Europe would be linked in a confederacy that had abolished war. A generation passed, and the winged victory is now a struggling hope, her pinions singed with the heat of battle, her song mingled with the rumour of massacre, speeding, a fugitive from fact, to the diviner climes of an ideal world. The logic of the revolution has worked to its predestined conclusion. It dreamed too eagerly of the end. It thought in indictments. It packed the present on its tumbrils, and cleared away the past with its dialectical guillotine. When the present was condemned and the past buried, the future had somehow eluded it. It executed the mother, and marvelled that the child should die.

The human mind can never be satisfied with the mere assurance that sooner or later the golden years will come. The mere lapse of time is in itself intolerable. If our waking life and our years of action are to regain a meaning, we must perceive that the process of evolution is itself significant and interesting. We are to-day so penetrated with that thought, that the notion of a state of perfection in the future seems to us as inconceivable and as little interesting as Rousseau's myth of a state of innocence in the past. We know very well that our ideal, whether we see it in the colours of Plato or Godwin or William Morris, does but measure the present development of our faculties. Long before the dream is realised in fact, a new horizon will have been unfolded before the imagination of mankind.

What is of value in this endless process is precisely the unfolding of ideals which record themselves, however imperfectly, in institutions, and still more the developing sense of comradeship and sympathy which links us in relations of justice and love with every creature that feels. We are old enough to pass lightly over the enthusiastic paradoxes that intoxicated the youth of the progressive idea. It is a truth that outworn institutions fetter and dwarf the mind of man. It is also a truth that institutions have moulded and formed that mind. To condemn the past is in the same breath to blast the future. The true basis for that piety towards our venerable inheritance which Burke preached, is that it has made for us the possibility of advance.

But our strivings would be languid, our march would be slow, were it not for the revolutionary leaven which Godwin's generation set fermenting. They taught how malleable and plastic is the human mind. They saw that by a resolute effort to change the environment of institutions and customs which educate us, we can change ourselves. They liberated us not so much from "priests and kings" as from the deadlier tyranny of the belief that human nature, with all its imperfections, is an innate character which it were vain to hope to reform. Their teaching is a tonic to the will, a reminder still eloquent, still bracing, that among the forces which make history the chief is the persuasion of the understanding, the conscious following of a rational ideal. From much that is iconoclastic and destructive in their ideal we may turn away unconvinced. There remain its ardent statement of the duty of humanity, which shames our practice after a century of progress, and its faith in the efficacy of unregimented opinion to supersede brute force. They taught a lesson which posterity has but half learned. We shall be the richer for returning to them, as much by what we reject as by what we embrace.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL

LECKY. History of England in the 18th Century.

LESLIE STEPHEN.—History of English Thought in the 18th Century.

OLIVER ELTON..—A Survey of English Literature.

EDWARD DOWDEN—The French Revolution and English Literature.

The most vivid impression of the period from the standpoint of Godwin's Circle is conveyed in the Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft edited by Hazlitt, and in Hazlitt's portraits of Godwin, Malthus and Mackintosh in The Spirit of the Age (Everyman's Library).

Of the opposite way of thinking the one immortal record is Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution. Lord Morley's Burke (English Men of Letters) should be read, and the eloquent exposition by Lord Hugh Cecil (Conservatism) in this (H.U.L.) series.

The main works of the French revolutionary thinkers have been issued in Dent's series of French classics. For study and pleasure consult Lord Morley's books on Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot.

The details given in the first chapter concerning the London Corresponding Society are based on its pamphlets in the British Museum.

THOMAS PAINE

Paine's writings are published in cheap editions by the Rationalist Press, and may be had bound in one volume. The same press issues a cheap edition of the admirable Life by Dr. Moncure D. Conway.

WILLIAM GODWIN

Godwin's works are now procurable only in old libraries, with the exception of Caleb Williams. Political Justice should be read in the second edition (1796), which is maturer than the first and more lively than the third. A modern summary of it by Mr. Salt, with the full text of the last section "On Property," was published by Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. This selection emphasises his communism, but hardly does full justice to the novelty of his anarchist opinions. Full biographical data are to be found in William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, by Mr. Kegan Paul, which contains a readable collection of letters. There is a painstaking and elaborate study in French by Raymond Gourg (Felix Alcan, 1908) and a stimulating little essay in German from the anarchist standpoint (William Godwin, der Theoretiker des Kommunistischen Anarchismus. Von Pierre Ramus. Leipzig. Dietrich).

For a modern statement of Anarchist Communism read Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (Chapman and Hall).

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

The Rights of Woman has been reissued in Everyman's Library. The volume of Selections in the Regent Library (Herbert and Daniel) was well edited by Miss Jebb, and may be recommended, for Mary Wollstonecraft rather gains than loses by compression. For her life Mr. Kegan Paul's William Godwin should be consulted. The edition of the Rights, published by T. Fisher Unwin, contains an admirable critical study of Mrs. Fawcett. There is no general history of the so-called "feminist" movement, and in English books the French pioneers are ignored. Mr. Lyon Blease has some good historical chapters in The Emancipation of English Women.

SHELLEY

Shelley literature is a library in itself. The standard edition is Forman's; the standard biography is the tolerant, human, gossipy Life by Professor Dowden. The general reader can use no better edition than Mrs. Shelley's. Of critical essays the most notable are Matthew Arnold's oddly unsympathetic essay, and Sir Leslie Stephen's informing but hostile study on Godwin and Shelley ("Hours in a Library"). Professor Santayana may be mentioned among the few critics who have realised that Shelley thought before he sang (Winds of Doctrine). Incomparably the best of all the critical essays is the little monograph by Francis Thompson (Burns and Oates).



POSTSCRIPT, 1942

Since this book was written two indispensable aids to the study of Godwin and his Circle have been published. (1) An adequate modern life of Godwin is now available: The Life of William Godwin by Ford K. Brown (J. M. Dent & Sons). The work could hardly have been better done. (2) Mr. Elbridge Colby has given us in two volumes a modern edition of The Life of Thomas Holcroft (Constable & Co.) by himself with Hazlitt's continuation. Mr. Colby's scholarly notes and introduction add greatly to its value.

A modern edition of Godwin's Political Justice (Knopf, Political Science Classics) is now available, but cannot be recommended. The editor has abbreviated it by capricious omissions.

The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers by Carl L. Becker (Oxford University Press, also Yale) is a most readable study of the political thought of the period. See also Professor H. J. Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism (Allen & Unwin) and Voltaire by H. N. Brailsford in this series.



INDEX

Age of Reason, 75

Arnold, Matthew, 184, 220

Arnot, 174

Baldwin, Edward, 172

Barbauld, Mrs., 192

Blake, Wm., 35, 66

Bright, John, 115

Burke, 15-26, 63

Burney, Fanny, 18

Caleb Williams, 143

Calvinism, 79

Chesterfield, Lord, 195

Clairmont, Mrs. (afterwards Godwin), 169-70

Clairmont, Jane, 169

Coleridge, S. T., 51-55, 86, 156, 173

Condorcet, 22, 23, 27, 92, 109, 110, 197

Convention, English, 44 —— Scottish, 41-43

Cooper, Thomas, 83, 84

Corresponding Society (see London)

Dundas, 40, 44

Enquirer, The, 145

Essays (on Religion) by Wm. Godwin, 180

Fenelon, 130

Fleetwood, 176

Gatton, Borough of, 25

Gerrald, Joseph, 43, 88, 89

Gillray, 155

Godwin, William: as historian 22; letter on trial of twelve Reformers, 46; experience during Revolution, 49-51; influence on Coleridge and Southey, 51-55; relation to Paine, 64, 65, 71; relation to Holcroft, 84-88; early life, 78; Political Justice, 89-141; Marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, 149; Caleb Williams, 143; controversies, 155; estimate of his work, 163; second marriage and later life, 163; later works, 172; relations with Shelley, 174; death, 178; religious views, 179; intellectual influence on Shelley, 216 seq.

Godwin, William (junior), 170

Godwin, Mrs. (see Wollstonecraft and Clairmont)

Hardy, Thomas, 33, 37, 39, 41, 44

Hazlitt, 9, 78, 152, 159, 168, 173

Helvetius, 31, 39, 96, 99, 100, 102, 105, 120, 166, 171, 179, 187

Herve, 119

Holbach, Baron d', 31, 196

Holcroft, Thomas, quoted, 31; early life of, 35, 36; trial of, 44, 45, 48; association with Paine, 65; Influence on Godwin, 84-88

Imlay, Fanny, 148, 169

Imlay, Gilbert, 148

Jones, Sir Wm., 37

Kames, Lord, 193

Kant, 11

Lafayette, 62, 64

Lamb, Charles, 173

Leibnitz, 11, 95

London Corresponding Society, 33-48, 66

Lovell, R., 53

Lytton, Bulwer, 174

Mably, 87

Mackintosh, Sir James, 16, 157

Malthus, 29, 158

Margarot, 42

Marius, 128, 220

Milton, 192, 212

Montesquieu, 31, 90, 97

Muir, 42

Napoleon, 154

Paine, Thomas, 16, 34, 39, 56; biographical sketch, 57-68; political views 69-75; religious views, 75-77

Palmer, 42

Pantisocracy, 51-55

Parr, Rev. Dr., 157

Patrickson, 174

Pitt, 40, 44, 66, 91

Plato, Platonism, 102, 104, 126, 131, 197, 218, 234, 243

Plutarch, 182

Political Justice, 89-141

Price, Rev. Dr., 10-15, 248

Priestley, 11, 39, 81, 171

Rights of Man, Paine's, 63, 69

Rights of Woman—a Vindication of the, 148 seq.

Ritson, 35, 170

Roosevelt, Theodore, 75

Rousseau, 21, 101, 191, 194

Sandemanians, 79

Sepulchres, Godwin's Essay on, 22

Shelley, 9, 104, 168; personal relations with Godwin, 174; intellectual outlook, 212; debt to Godwin, 216; his mythology, 225; his view of human perfectibility, 230

Shelley, Mary, nee Godwin, 144, 153, 169, 176, 180

Sheridan, 82

Sinclair, 42

Skirving, 42

Socrates, Socratic (see Plato)

Southey, 51-55, 151

St. Leon, 160, 172

Stanhope, Earl, 12

Swift, 131, 193

Tolstoy, 120, 138

Tooke, Horne, 34, 43, 44, 46

Turgot, 28

Vindication of the Rights of Women (see Rights)

Voltaire, 95, 221

Wedgwood, 170

Weissmann, 98

Wells, H. G., 221

Westbrook, Harriet, 175

Windham, 48

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 16; early life, 147; marriage and death, 149-154; her personality, 202; her originality, 199; summary of "Rights," 204; relation to French Revolution, 186-199; reflection in Shelley, 238

Wordsworth, 8, 51, 157



Transcriber's Note:

Passages in italics are indicated by underscore.

Passages in bold font are indicated by bold.

The following misprint has been corrected: "magnaminity" corrected to "magnanimity" (page 124) "subjecttion" corrected to "subjection" (page 187) "Gilray" corrected to "Gillray" (page 255)

All other spelling and punctuation is presented as in the original.

Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicate both the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph as presented in the original text.