his father and all of you equal alike, what I have scraped together with the utmost frugality, and if you please to lay out £5 for the tooles he wants, I will keep it back out of his father's and send it to you and am much obleged to your wife for the regard she professes for your brother John, but fear most, if not all, are so deep in debt as not to be the better for anything I can do for them, am affraid that London streets will be filled with begging Godwins when I am gone, but that's not the worst. Idleness is the mother of all vice, forgers, pickpockets or Players, which I take to be very little better. Do you know of any of them that are following the precepts of the precious Redeemer who suffered the Ignominious deth of the Cross to save sinners from eternal death? I wish you to let me know if you will lay out what I mentioned for young John by a parcel we expect from Hannah. I don't know if it will be soon, but that's no matter, if you set him in a way of geting his bread. I shall send a few things for his wife against she lies in, as a bed-gown, a decent shirt and shift. And if you can give 10s. for interist of the £10 you have in hand for 4 yards of strong cloth for a shirt, and get it made for him, there will be some left to mend it, and any little old things for the child. I am in hopes it will not be ill bestowed, and will be returned to you in better blessings than earth affords, for without the Lord bless, vain is the help of man. I hope Hannah will be wiseer than to make any entertainment this year. coles are 46s. the chaldron, and 15s. carriage to Dalling. Hully finds enough to do with all his industery. You will receive a turkey from me. Don't once think of sending me the least thing. I shall be very angry if you do. I wish your happiness most sincearly. Hully, his wife, and children are well. Their little one just begins to go alone, a year and a quarter old. I would recommend you to get an oven to hang over the fire to bake pudding and meat upon it. If you can get smal wood to burn on the top, it takes very little fire under it. We bake most of our victuals so it will save many steps for yr servants. Young Mr Raven is not likely to live many days; no medican has been found successful. It would surprise you to know how greedyly he swallows physic, so DISASTROUS SPECULATIONS. 129 loth to die. They all think his mother will loose her sences for him, she is shrunk with grief and fiteague in a surprising manner, but, I am afraid, looks not up to the supreem being; reads the prayer-book to him, but that's all.-Your affectionate mother, A. GODWIN." The year 1805 is the date of Godwin's greatest and most disastrous venture. If he could but have let well alone, if Mrs Godwin had not been a speculative, and, as she calls herself, "a managing woman," there was at the same moment a tide in his affairs which, had he taken it at the flood, would have led to a very different state of things. The account had best be given in an autobiographical letter, of which the copy is unfinished and unaddressed. "My manner of life for several years in respect of pecuniary matters, you, I daresay, are acquainted with. . . . As long as I remained alone, I neither asked nor would accept aid from any man. I even contrived to bring up by my own means, and to inform by my own instructions, the son of one of my poor relations, as well as frequently to afford assistance to others. I lived entirely as I listed. "Since I have been a married man, the case has been otherwise. I never repented the connections of that sort I have formed; but the maintenance of a family and an establishment has been a heavy expense, and I have never been able, with all my industry, which has been very persevering, entirely to accomplish this object. . . . I have five children in my house. Fanny, the daughter of Mr Imlay, who bears my own name, Mary, my own daughter by the same mother, two children of my present wife by a former husband, and a son, the offspring of my present marriage. My temper is of a recluse and contemplative cast; had it been otherwise, I should, perhaps, on some former occasions, have entered into the active concerns of the world, and not have been connected with it merely as a writer of books. My present wife is of a different complexion. assist our establishment by translations; but her health and strength have somewhat given way, I really believe, for want of those relaxations and excursions to sea-bathings and wateringplaces, which are the usual lot of women in the class of life in which she was born. She did her best for some years to "Under these circumstances, and being by nature endowed with a mind of prudence and forecast, her thoughts forcibly turned towards some commercial undertaking. With united health and strength we could hope for no more, in the mode of selling MSS. to booksellers than making our yearly income equal our yearly expenditure. But the health of one or both of us might give way, the advance of age might diminish my powers of unintermitted exertion, or death might cut off one or the other of us; then, what was to become of the maintenance and education of our children? The commercial undertaking which most naturally offered itself was a magazine of books for the use and amusement of children, and my wife, with a sagacity commensurate to her forecast, pitched upon a person singularly well qualified to superintend the details of the concern. ... “On the 15th of March [1805] I concluded a contract with my bookseller for writing a History of England, of the same size with that of David Hume, which would of course be the occupation of years, and for which I was to receive £2000, besides a share of the copyright. . . This contract secured me a provision in part for some years to come, and assigned me an employment to my heart's content. "While this negotiation was pending, my wife laid before me her plan, and I felt that the arguments by which it was recommended were such as I could not resist. As the discussion with my bookseller, previous to signing the contract, occupied some weeks, I employed that time in writing the chief of a work which was to be the first-born child of our new undertaking. 66 'Among many difficulties which were to be conquered in this enterprise, one arose from the absolute necessity there was that the public should entertain no suspicion that I was connected with the concern. The popular cry for some years past on the topics of government and religion has been so opposite to the principles I am known to entertain as to fill the Reviews and other ordinary publications of the day with abuse against me of the most scurrilous cast. I had seen several things treated in this style, borrowed from the fish-market, for no other reason than that they were mine. I knew that I had nothing to do but to suppress my name, and I should immediately have all these gentlemen in my train. That I was not mistaken in this will appear in part from a paper I enclose containing their character of my first production under this plan, entitled 'Baldwin's Fables,' published in October last [1805]. "Thus prepared I placed my agent at Midsummer last in a little house in Hanway Street, Oxford Street, a small street, but of great thoroughfare and commerce. The rent of the house is £40' per annum (£35 of which are made by lodgers), and the coming in and fixtures were £60. I have a renewable agreement for the house for a term of years [Unfinished] ... The Fables of which Godwin speaks were begun on Feb. 22d, were rapidly written, and finished on March 26th. The books published by him under the name of Baldwin were: "Fables Ancient and Modern." "The Pantheon, or Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome." "The History of England.' Many men of middle age must remember that their first introduction to History was through the medium of these little books, excellently printed and illustrated. Uncritical they necessarily were, in pre-Niebuhrian days, nor could they now be read with advantage by the young, in whom we might wish to cultivate, if it might be, some historic sense. But they may be turned over with interest, for they show how fresh and keen was the interest Godwin took in the young, how he, who evidently had some difficulty in placing himself at the standpoint of other men, could do so at that of of a little child, and hence we grow more and more to understand the power and attraction he still had for the young. The Prefaces are all worth reading now, and are couched in clear, vigorous English. One passage is so far reaching and pregnant that it may well bear quotation here. It is from the Preface to the History of Rome. "It has been disputed whether Mucius ever thrust his hand into the fire, whether Curtius leaped into the gulf, or Regulus returned to Carthage, and some writers, following up this hint, have endeavoured, by sophistical reasonings and subtle distinctions, to set aside almost every example of Roman virtue on record. In answer to this I shall only say here that the stories were thus understood by the Romans themselves, who had the best means of information, and who felt in their own bosoms what a Roman was, and that the different parts of the Roman History, considered as the different stages of a particular scene of civilization, hang together with a consistency beyond all fiction, and even beyond the real history of any other country or people in the world. Youth is not the period of criticism and disquisition. If these narratives are to be destroyed, let that task be reserved for a riper age, when books of the plan and size of the present are no longer applicable; and in the meantime, let our children reap the benefit of such instructive and animating examples. If they are fables (which I hope no one of the juvenile readers of my work will at any time be induced to believe), they are at least more full of moral, and of encouragement to noble sentiments and actions than all the other narratives, fictitious or true, which mere man ever produced." |