At last we have received a letter from Mr William Nicholson, so circumstantially meagre and hide-bound. Damnation! His frost inflames my gall. He does not mean it thus; but experimental philosophy has rendered him most wise, and full of incoherency. I suppose he might be induced to walk as far as the end of the street to serve a friend, provided it was quite certain his wife would not want him to weigh ten grains of rhubarb in the interim. Good God! how nearly are greatness and littleness allied. And so it is with us all. I have not told you, nor can I at present tell, how nobly Clementi behaved to me; but you, and more than you, shall some day hear."

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The Same to the Same.

"ALTONA, Sept. 9th, 1800.

I know not how to speak of 'St Leon' so as to do you justice. I always felt the insurmountable defect of the work, and the strained if not improbable incidents that must be invented to exhibit a miserable man who had every means of enjoyment in his power. You have repeated to me times almost innumerable the necessity of keeping characters in action, and never suffering them to sermonize, yet of this fault 'St Leon' is particularly found guilty by all whom I have heard speak of the work, with whom my feelings coincide. Is it then a weak and unworthy performance? Far indeed the reverse. Men must have arrived at an uncommon degree of general wisdom, when 'St Leon' shall no longer be read. Your Marguerite is inimitable. Knowing the model after which you drew, as often as I recollected it, my heart ached while I read. Your Bethlem Gabor is wonderfully drawn. It is like the figures of Michel Angelo, any section of an outline of which taken apart would be improbable and false, but which are so combined as to form a sublime whole. Having read I could coldly come back, and point to the caricature traits of the portrait, but while reading I could feel nothing but astonishment and admiration. Through the

whole work there is so much to censure, and so much to astonish, that in my opinion it is in every sense highly interesting. Its faults and its beauties are worthy the attention of the most acute critic. . .

"Do you wilfully omit to sign your letters? No. The question is an outrage. "T. HOLCROFT."

Before Holcroft wrote the last letter to be quoted in this year, he had heard that "Antonio" had been acted and had failed.

The Same to the Same.

"ALTONA, Decr. 26th, 1800.

.. Enough of these paltry and repining thoughts. Would that [want of money] were the worst of evils. You have a grief upon your mind which requires all your fortitude to keep at bay. Do not imagine it is unfelt by me. Before your account reached me I read the malignant and despicable triumph of 'The Times.' It was not 'Alonzo' but William Godwin who was brought to the bar, and not to be tried, but to be condemned. It was in vain to croak, having seriously warned you as I did: you were of a different opinion; and to have been more urgent would only have produced disagreeable feelings, not conviction, but with me it was a moral certainty that if your name were only whispered, the condemnation of your tragedy was ensured. J. P. Kemble well knew this; and hence his refusals and forebodings. Yet it pleased me to see that malignity itself was obliged to own the play had beauties. It then asks, if it were any wonder? Good God! how disgusting is the naive and open impudence of such a question, when joined to the ribald abuse by which it was preceded. I cannot relieve you; that is-do not think the phrase too strong that is my misery: yet I wish you would tell me what is the state of your money affairs? I am in great anxiety. I form a thousand pictures of hovering distress of the dear children, the house you have to support, and the thoughts that are perhaps silently corroding your heart. Do not subtract from the truth in

CORRESPONDENCE WITH ARNOT.

27

compassion to my feelings, strong as they are for myself and others, they always end in enquiring if there be any effectual remedy? Direct in future to me, at Mr Schuhmacher's, New Burg, Hamburg: he is my friend, and will remit my letters safely, for I know not where I shall be."

Besides Holcroft, Godwin's other foreign correspondent was Arnot, whose letters begin again early in the year; he was as undaunted and as poor as ever, and suffering much in bodily health. The loss of the journal kept by him is greatly to be regretted, for, as will be seen, his travels extended to a part of Europe even now but little known to foreigners; and he had the great merit, still rare, of sympathy with those among whom he came.

F. Arnot to William Godwin.

[VIENNA]" February 16, 1800.

"I have not yet received an answer to two letters which I wrote to you about the end of November.

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My friends would write to me more frequently, if they knew what a gratification to me a letter from them affords. It rouses me from my indifference, revives my affection for them, and imprints afresh their image upon my mind: and this is not a little necessary in a mode of life which, as Dyson, in his only letter to me, well observes, is so unfavourable to the growth of amicable attachments. When I read his letter first, I thought he might possibly be in the right in this, but I did not then so strongly feel its truth as I have done since.

"When I received my portmanteau, I began to write my journal of last year. When I had brought it up to my arrival in Riga, I read over all I had written, and was so little satisfied with it, that I lost all courage to proceed. I now think I shall scarcely have time to finish it till I return to England.

"In one or other of the two letters I have mentioned, I told you I would go next summer to Hungary. I shall set out pro

bably about the beginning of May. My route I have not yet determined. Upon looking at the map, I have been thinking to go from Opa and Pesth straight to Belgrade, or at least to Semlin, which is over against it, and from thence going through the Bannat, to travel over Transylvania and the North of Hungary toward the Carpathian Mountains. I need scarcely tell you, that every one here who has heard of my design, has advised me against it, as a thing highly dangerous, if not impracticable.

"When I left England I had no thoughts of going to Hungary. I meant to have gone from Germany immediately to France, on the supposition that peace would, ere this, have been established. In going to Hungary, I deviate from my first project; though it is a deviation which I hope will be rather an improvement. But I will deviate from it no further. Upon returning from Hungary, I intend to go directly to France, peace or not. If I can do so with safety to myself, I do not suppose that any disadvantage will thereby arise to others, and the consciousness of this makes me hesitate the less in following my own inclinations, without regarding any edicts that may have been made to the contrary in England. To what part of the world can a man go to avoid the encroachments and tyranny of his fellows? I must not go to France, it seems, because, if I do, a man called William Pitt will not let me return to England without molestation, but will endeavour to punish me by a law of his own making. What an impudent fellow he is!...

"My love to all my friends. I hope the children are well, and that they still continue to be the sources of much happiness to you. Long may they be so. I am, with great esteem, yours,

The Same to the Same.

"JOHN ARNOT.”

[VIENNA], " 19th Feb. 1800.

"I am sorry you showed my brother my journal from Edinburgh to London. Although I do not think it contains anything, as far as I can now recollect, to entitle me to the abhorrence of those who shall peruse it, yet I am sensible that my mind, at the

time in which I wrote it, was in a very perturbed state; and I do not much wonder that my brother should not wish, as indeed I do not wish myself, that it should come before the public eye in its present form. I wish you had not showed it him. I know my family better than you. I cannot, indeed, bring myself to doubt my brother's honour; but when you gave it him upon the two conditions, that he only should peruse it, and that he should return it as soon as read, why did he say you should have it in four days? why specify four days? and having specified four days, why keep it for a fortnight? Mr Sevright is in London.

"But why do I put these questions to you? Can you answer them any more than myself?

"Abhorrence! Do you abhor me, Godwin? I cannot recollect all that I wrote, but this I remember, that your sensations upon having read it seemed to me to be not those of abhorrence. My brother is a good young man, as men go; I do not doubt his honour, but I doubt very much if his sense of right and wrong is either more just or more acute than yours.

"Man, as you justly observe, is the creature of success. If I finish my undertaking successfully, I shall ever acknowledge that the concern you had in it, though accidental, was far from trivial. I formed the design before I knew or had any hopes of knowing you; without you I would certainly have attempted it, but without the assistance which I have derived by your means, I should as certainly have sunk under the execution. When I consider the history of my own mind, I may almost say that to travel was my destiny. I was driven to it by an irresistible impulse; by an inextinguishable thirst of knowledge, which is probably inherent in every youthful uncorrupted mind. The dangers, and even the hardships which I have already overcome, although great, are not superior to those which, by all accounts, I shall still have to encounter. I may be cut off: such an event may well happen: but I see no reason that you should therefore have a portion of remorse, as if you had been my murderer. You know better than any others the motives by which you have been influenced in giving me the encouragement and assistance you have done; and the