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prize the favour in proportion to the sacrifice. I feel persuaded that Mr Rand will produce such a picture as will deserve to be prized; and a good likeness of you I should deem invaluable. . . . "Thomas Cooper has been obliged to appeal to public sympathy for his family. The people came forward very handsomely. At Philadelphia they had a benefit which yielded 2500 dols., and one was lately given in New York, amounting to 4500 dols.-I am, &c., "JOHN HOWARd Payne.”

We may well suppose that Mrs Stanhope may have considered an autograph letter was, in fact, a sufficient contribution to her album. She may have considered he was not unlike that one of her own sex, who, "whispering she would ne'er consent, consented."

William Godwin to Mrs L. Stanhope.

"Jan. 30, 1834.

"DEAR MADAM.-I am fully sensible of the compliment you pay me in requesting a contribution from my pen to your album, but my principal sensation on the occasion is pain in refusing you. Quin, the actor, after retiring from the stage, was accustomed annually to play Falstaff for the benefit of his old friend, Ryan. But at length, being applied to once more, and having lost several of his teeth, he answered that he fervently desired for Ryan all manner of good, but, by God, he would not whistle Falstaff for any man.' So I, who am as clumsy as an elephant, must reply in this case, that I greet you with my utmost good wishes, but will not attempt a hornpipe even for Mrs L. Stanhope.-Believe me, dear Madam, most sincerely yours, W. GODWIN."

Godwin ceased his career as author with "The Lives of the Necromancers," but his pen was still active, and his brain

still vigorous. In quite the last years of his life he re

I touched, in some cases re-wrote, and in others wrote for

the first time, a series of essays, which he designed to call "The Genius of Christianity Unveiled," and to this refers the last letter to his wife remaining among his papers. Mrs Godwin was absent on her short annual excursion to Southend. The work, which was to have been prepared for publication by Mrs Shelley after her father's death, was withheld for various reasons till three years since, when it was published under the more modest title, more truly descriptive, of “Essays, hitherto unpublished.”

"My health is better. I have had no return of the sick feeling which obstinately pursued me for three weeks after my journey to Harrow. I have written at my manuscript for four days, a little at a time, and feeling as if I were too old to do much. But it cheers

me. . . .

“Mrs Shelley dined with me on Friday 22d, and I with her the following Monday. She spent the evening with me yesterday. We should meet oftener, but I rather decline going to her evenings. The evenings are now dark, and the walk across the park at a late hour is anything but pleasant. . . .

"I am afraid to say how much I wish to see you, lest you should call me selfish. Do, however, stay longer, if you think it will do you good. I have still £50, the produce of the

'Necromancers.'"

His last word on politics is contained in a letter to Mr Cross, given below; his last words on religion in the Essays published since his death. The letter, though of an

LAST WORDS ON POLITICS.

329

earlier date, seems in place here. He was true to himself, consistent and unwavering.

William Godwin to W. Cross.

Jan. 31, 1831.

"I am extremely sorry that any silence on my part should have been the cause of giving you pain. . . . I have been all my life accustomed to regard man as everything, 'the most excellent and noble creature of the world,' and property as comparatively mere dross and dirt. I was sorry, therefore, to see you count the value of a man by pounds, shillings, and pence. I remember a plan of Mr H. Tooke on the subject of Parliamentary Reform, which was to give every man a right to as many votes for a repre sentative as he was able and willing to purchase at a stipulated price. I do not know whether he was in jest or earnest, and I dare say you never saw his plan. Yours is better than his because yours does not depend so much on whim as his did. .

"I am a republican because I am a philanthropist. That form of society, perhaps, is the best which shall make individual man feel most generous and most noble. As poor Dr Watts says, 'The

mind's the standard of the man.'

"With regard to the revolution which occurred in France in July last, it appears to me that the leaders did well in the points you specify. You say that your voluntary association would have proved strong enough to resist all the force that combined Europe could have brought against them. Be it so: yet the despots of Europe would not have thought so. And to prevent a war is much better than to finish a war with victory to the just cause. I am glad, therefore, that the leaders said to Europe,' We will have a king as we have had before. Be not alarmed: we will set no example of anarchy and the dissolution of government to the people over whom you reign.' I moreover rejoice in the generous magnanimity and forbearance the leaders have displayed, so much the reverse of the Revolution of 1789. I finally rejoice in the energy that has saved the lives of the ministers of Charles X.”

Though his mind was thus vigorous, his body was showing signs of decay. The occasional maladies from which he had suffered for many years, giddiness, faintings, and numbness in his limbs, occurred at more frequent periods; the entries in the Diary on given days that he felt quite well are evidence added to the record of maladies that on other days he was aware that “age with stealing steps had clawed him in her clutch." Yet it is possible the habit of minute introspection, extending to his bodily condition, led him to dwell on some matters of which even less healthy men might have thought less; and, on the whole, it was a singularly vigorous old age. To the last years, even to the last days of his life, his habits were • the same as they had been forty years before. Reading of the most varied kind, but by preference the Classics and Italian literature, occupied his mornings, visits from and to friends his afternoons. He still dined out and attended the theatre, and even so late as Thursday, March 24, 1836, he went to the Opera to hear Zampa.

He was aware, however, that the end could not be far distant, and contemplated it with the same philosophical calm which had characterized him through life. On August 21, 1834, he had written some reflections on the diaries he had kept for so many years, on a loose sheet of paper, that he might place it regularly and with method in its true position whenever he felt that the last entry in the Diary, as it lay open on his desk was made. He ended vol. xxxii. of this on the Saturday, March 26, 1836, with these words:

66

'Malfy, fin. Call on Hudson, Trelawny calls, cough, snow.” and then on the inside of the cover pasted the sheet which had so long waited for its place. It is as follows:

THE LAST PAGE OF DIARY.

331

August 21, 1834. "With what facility have I marked these pages with the stamp of rolling weeks and months and years—all uniform, all blank! What a strange power is this! It sees through a long vista of time, and it sees nothing. All this at present is mere abstraction, symbols, not realities. Nothing is actually seen the whole is ciphers, conventional marks, imaginary boundaries of unimagined things. Here is neither joy nor sorrow, pleasure nor pain. Yet when the time shall truly come, and the revolving year shall bring the day, what portentous events may stamp the page ! what anguish, what horror, or by possibility what joy, what Godlike elevation of soul! Here are fevers, and excruciating pains in their sacred secundine asleep.' Here may be the saddest reverses, destitution and despair, detrusion and hunger and nakedness, without a place wherein to lay our head, wearisome days and endless nights in dark and unendurable monotony, variety of wretchedness; yet of all one gloomy hue; slumbers without sleep, waking without excitation, dreams all heterogeneous and perplexed, with nothing distinct and defined, distracted without the occasional bursts and energy of distraction. And these pages look now all fair, innocent, and uniform. I have put down eighty years and twenty-three days, and I might put down one hundred and sixty years. But in which of these pages shall the pen which purposes to record, drop from my hands for ever, never again to be resumed? I shall set down the memoranda of one day, with the full expectation of resuming my task on the next, or my fingers may refuse their functions in the act of forming a letter, and leave the word never by the writer to be completed.

"Everything under the sun is uncertain. No provision can be a sufficient security against adverse and unexpected fortune, least of all to him who has not a stipulated income bound to him by the forms and ordinances of society. This, as age and feebleness of body and mind advances, is an appalling consideration, ‘a man cannot tell what shall be,' to what straits he may be driven, what trials and privations and destitution and struggles and griefs may be reserved for him."