All green was vanished, save of pine and yew,
That still displayed their melancholy hue;
Save the green holly with its berries red,
And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread.
(From Tales-'The Patron.')

It is hardly unfair to compare Crabbe's

Better to love amiss than nothing to have loved, from The Struggles of Conscience, with Tennyson's

'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

It was Crabbe who opined, not without reason, that he who often reads, will sometimes wish to write.' It is in The Widow's Tale that we read of

A tender, timid maid! who knew not how
To pass a pig-sty, or to face a cow,

and who was aggrieved

When the coarse cloth she saw, with many a stain
Soiled by rude hinds who cut and come again.

An admirable Life of the poet by his son, the Rev. George Crabbe (1785-1857), for twenty-three years vicar of Bredfield, Suffolk, was prefixed to the edition of the works published in eight volumes in 1834. See also Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library (2nd series, 1876), E. FitzGerald's Readings in 'Tales of the Hall' (1882), and Kebbel's Crabbe (1888).

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), for more than half a century conspicuous as an author on jurisprudence and ethics, lived in intimate correspondence with the leading men of several generations and of various countries, and was unceasingly active in the propagation of utilitarianism and in insisting on reform in law. The son of a pushing and prosperous London attorney, he was educated at Westminster School and Queen's College, Oxford. He was little over twelve when he went to Oxford, but even then he was, from his precocity, not unjustly known by the name of 'the philosopher;' and though he never liked Oxford methods of study or of life, he took his degree of B.A. in 1763, and after studying law at Lincoln's Inn, was called to the Bar. He had a strong dislike to the legal profession, and never but once pleaded in public. His first publication was an acute but hypercritical examination of a passage in Blackstone's Commentaries, and was called A Fragment on Government (1776). The critique was prompted, no doubt, by a passion for improvement in those shapes in which the lot of mankind is meliorated by it,' but also by a profound contempt for Blackstone. He was stimulated by Priestley's writings. 'In the phrase, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," I then saw delineated,' says Bentham, 'for the first time, a plain as well as a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous in human conduct, whether in the field of morals or of politics.' The famous phrase was used first by Hutcheson (1726), then in Italian by Beccaria, and was found by Priestley in a translation of Beccaria's Crimes and Punishments

(1766); but unhappily Priestley, Bentham, and the rest have none of them given a final and universal definition of human happiness. To ensure it, Bentham considered it necessary to reconstruct the laws and government-to have annual parliaments and universal suffrage, secret voting, and a return to the ancient practice of paying wages to parliamentary representatives. In all his political, sociological, and juridical writings this doctrine of utility, so understood, is the leading and pervading principle. In 1778 he published a pamphlet on The Hard Labour Bill, recommending an improvement in the mode of criminal punishment; amongst those that followed were Letters on Usury (1787), Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Politics (1789), Discourses on Civil and Penal Legislation (1802), Punishments and Rewards (1811), A Treatise on Judicial Evidence (1813), Codification and Public Instruction (1817), and The Book of Fallacies (1824). The article in the National Dictionary of Biography quotes a classified list of seventy-four publications. By the death of his father in 1792, Bentham succeeded to property in London and to farms in Essex yielding from £500 to £600 a year. He lived frugally, but with elegance, in one of his London houses, kept young men as secretaries, corresponded and wrote daily, and by a life of temperance and industry, with great self-complacency and the society of a few devoted friends, the eccentric philosopher attained to the age of eighty-four. He left his body to be dissected, and his skeleton, clothed in his usual attire, is preserved in University College, London.

His works were collected and edited by Bowring and Hill Burton, and published in eleven volumes. But as some of the works were rearranged, abridged, and altered by Bowring and others, it is sometimes doubtful how far the statements perfectly represent Bentham's own words or ideas. Originally Bentham's style was natural, clear, and even brilliant. In his later works he adopted a peculiar uncouth style and nomenclature, which deter ordinary readers, and indeed have rendered many of his works a dead-letter. The substance of his published works and MSS. was rearranged and translated into excellent French by M. Dumont, a Genevese disciple, and there were Spanish and Portuguese translations. James Mill made known his principles at home; Sir Samuel Romilly discussed and criticised them in the Edinburgh Review, and Sir James Mackintosh in his Ethical Dissertation. Of his new coined words it should be noted that some--such as codify, minimise, international-have been found useful, and have become an essential and permanent part of the English language. In the science of legislation Bentham exhibited profound capacity and extensive knowledge; but he is chargeable with not sufficiently 'weighing the various circumstances which require his rules to be modified in different countries and times, in order to render them either more useful, more easily introduced, more generally respected,

or more certainly executed.' J. S. Mill declared : 'There is hardly anything in Bentham's philosophy which is not true. The bad part of his writings is his resolute denial of all that he does not see, of all truths but those which he recognises.' This does not fully indicate the fact that he was both dogmatic and intolerant, holding that those who deliberately differed from him were either fools or knaves. He greatly furthered the improvement of the lamentable poor-laws; like so many of the older Radicals, he held that both for England and France, colonies are disadvantageous to the mother-country, and should be emancipated. Many of his schemes have been realised; many more are in course of realisation. The end and object of them all was the general welfare, and his chief error lay in conceiving that organic changes are possible by manifesto and enactment, or otherwise than through the growth and modification of popular needs, ideas, and institutions. In Mill's words, he found the philosophy of law a chaos, and left it a science;' and he was the philosophic pioneer of Liberalism and of Radicalism.

From the 'Defence of Usury.'

The business of a money-lender, though only among Christians and in Christian times a proscribed profession, has nowhere, nor at any time, been a popular one. Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have eaten their cake are the natural enemies of the children who have theirs. While the money is hoped for, and for a short time after it has been received, he who lends it is a friend and benefactor: by the time the money is spent, and the evil hour of reckoning is come, the benefactor is found to have changed his nature, and to have put on the tyrant and the oppressor. It is an oppression for a man to reclaim his own money; it is none to keep it from him. Among the inconsiderate -that is, among the great mass of mankind-selfish affections conspire with the social in treasuring up all favour for the man of dissipation, and in refusing justice to the man of thrift who has supplied him. In some shape or other, that favour attends the chosen object of it through every stage of his career. But in no stage of his career can the man of thrift come in for any share of it. It is the general interest of those with whom a man lives, that his expense should be at least as great as his circumstances will bear; because there are few expenses which a man can launch into but what the benefit of them is shared, in some proportion or other, by those with whom he lives. In that circle originates a standing law forbidding every man, on pain of infamy, to confine his expenses within what is adjudged to be the measure of his means, saving always the power of exceeding that limit as much as he thinks proper; and the means assigned him by that law may be ever so much beyond his real means, but are sure never to fall short of them. So close is the combination thus formed between the idea of merit and the idea of expenditure, that a disposition to spend finds favour in the eyes even of those who know that a man's circumstances do not entitle him to the means: and an upstart, whose chief

recommendation is this disposition, shall find himself to have purchased a permanent fund of respect, to the prejudice of the very persons at whose expense he has been gratifying his appetites and his pride. The lustre which the display of borrowed wealth has diffused over his character awes men during the season of his prosperity into a submission to his insolence, and when the hand of adversity has overtaken him at last, the recollection of the height from which he has fallen throws the veil of compassion over his injustice.

His

The condition of the man of thrift is the reverse. lasting opulence procures him a share, at least, of the same envy that attends the prodigal's transient display: but the use he makes of it procures him no part of the favour which attends the prodigal. In the satisfactions he derives from that use-the pleasure of possession, and the idea of enjoying at some distant period, which may never arrive-nobody comes in for any share. In the midst of his opulence he is regarded as a kind of insolvent, who refuses to honour the bills which their rapacity would draw upon him, and who is by so much the more criminal than other insolvents, as not having the plea of inability for an excuse.

Could there be any doubt of the disfavour which attends the cause of the money-lender in his competition with the borrower, and of the disposition of the public judgment to sacrifice the interest of the former to that of the latter, the stage would afford a compendious but a pretty conclusive proof of it. It is the business of the dramatist to study, and to conform to, the humours and passions of those on the pleasing of whom he depends for his success; it is the course which reflection must suggest to every man, and which a man would naturally fall into, though he were not to think about it. He may, and very frequently does, make magnificent pretences of giving the law to them: but woe be to him that attempts to give to them any other law than what they are disposed already to receive! If he would attempt to lead them one inch, it must be with great caution, and not without suffering himself to be led by them at least a dozen. Now I question whether, among all the instances in which a borrower and a lender of money have been brought together upon the stage, from the days of Thespis to the present, there ever was one in which the former was not recommended to favour in some shape or other-either to admiration, or to love, or to pity, or to all three-and the other, the man of thrift, consigned to infamy.

From Bentham's 'Commonplace Book.'

'O Locke! first master of intellectual truth! without whom those who have taught me would have been as nothing! let thy blest spirit, if now it looketh down upon the affairs of men, acknowledge my obedience to the first great lesson of thy life, in the assertion of independence, and make its report in my favour to the Throne, the Judgment-seat above. Priesdey was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth:-That the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation. Johnson is the pompous vamper of commonplace morality-of phrases often trite without being true. . . When the truths in a man's book, though many and important, are fewer than the errors; when his ideas, though the means of producing clear ones in other men, are found to be themselves not clear,

that book must die: Montesquieu must therefore die : he must die, as his great countryman, Descartes, had died before him he must wither as the blade withers when the corn is ripe : he must die, but let tears of gratitude and admiration bedew his grave. O Montesquieu ! the British constitution, whose death thou prophesiedst, will live longer than thy work, yet not longer than thy fame. Not even the incense of the illustrious Catharine can preserve thee. Locke-dry, cold, languid, wearisome, will live for ever. Montesquieu-rapid, brilliant, glorious, enchanting-will not outlive his century. I know I feel -I pity-and blush at the enjoyment of a liberty which the birth-place of that great writer (great with all his faults) forbade him to enjoy. I could make an immense book upon the defects of Montesquieu-I could make not a small one upon his excellencies. It might be worth while to make both, if Montesquieu could live.' See Life by Bowring in the collected works (in twenty-two parts, 1838-43; issued in 1844 in eleven volumes, with Introduction by J. H. Burton), and Burton's Benthamiana (1843).

William Godwin,

author of Caleb Williams, was born at Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire, 3rd March 1756, the seventh of the thirteen children of John Godwin (1723-72), a Dissenting minister, who moved to Debenham in 1758, and in 1760 to Guestwick in Norfolk. After three years' schooling at Hindolveston, three more with a tutor at Norwich, and one as usher in his former school, Godwin in 1773 entered Hoxton Presbyterian College, in 1778 quitted it as pure a Sandemanian and Tory as he had gone in. But during a five years' ministry at Ware, Stowmarket, and Beaconsfield, he turned Socinian and Republican, and by 1787 was a 'complete unbeliever.' Meanwhile he had taken to literature, in 1783-84 writing three novels for £42, a Life of Chatham, and Sketches of History, in Six Sermons. In 1785 he became principal writer in the New Annual Register. The French Revolution gave him an opening, and his Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influences on General Virtue and Happiness (2 vols. 4to, 1793), brought him fame, widespread influence, the leadership of a school of thought, and a thousand guineas. It was calmly subversive of everything (law and 'marriage, the worst of all laws'); but as it preached down violence, and was deemed caviare to the multitude, its author escaped prosecution. In Things as they Are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), Godwin's aim was to inculcate his characteristic doctrines, and to comprehend 'a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man.' His hero tells his own tale of suffering and of wrong-of innocence persecuted and reduced to the brink of death and infamy by aristocratic power, and by tyrannical or partially administered laws; but his story is so full of interest and vigour that the reader loses sight of the political object and the implied satire, and thinks only of the characters and incidents. The imagination of the novelist overpowered his philosophy; he was a greater

inventor than propagandist; and his character of Falkland is one of the most striking in the whole range of English fiction. But the political views he shared were soon brought still more aggressively forward. His friends, Holcroft, Thelwall, Horne Tooke, and others, were arrested and tried on a charge of high treason. Godwin had apparently not been formally associated with their societies, and however obnoxious to those in power, had not rendered himself amenable to the laws of his country. Yet if we may credit a curious entry in Sir Walter Scott's diary, he must have been early mixed up with the English Jacobins. Scott declared that Canning, while in the Temple, was startled out of somewhat revolutionary opinions by a visit from Godwin, who told him to his astonishment that, in expectation of a new order of things, the English Jacobins designed to place him, Canning, at the head of the revolution. He was much struck, and asked time to think what course he should take; and having thought the matter over, he went to Mr Pitt, and made the Anti-Jacobin confession of faith.' This must have been before 1793. In any case Godwin was ready with his pen in his friends' defence. Judge Eyre, in his charge to the grand jury, had laid down principles very different from his, and he instantly published Cursory Strictures on the judge's charge, so ably written that the pamphlet is said to have mainly led to the acquittal of the accused.

In 1796 Godwin issued a series of essays on Education, Manners, and Literature, entitled The Inquirer; in August 1797 he married Mary Wollstonecraft, who died five months later after giving birth to a daughter (Mrs Shelley). Godwin's contempt of the ordinary English modes of thinking and acting was displayed by this marriage. His wife brought with her a natural daughter by a former protector, and had lived with Godwin for some time before their marriage: The principal motive,' he says, 'for complying with the ceremony was the circumstance of Mary's being in a state of pregnancy.' In the Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, now written by him, all the details of her life and conduct are minutely related. In 1799 appeared his St Leon, a story of the 'miraculous,' and designed to illustrate human feelings and passions in incredible situations. His hero attains the possession of the philosopher's stone, and secures exhaustless wealth by transmuting the baser metals into gold; at the same time he learns the secret of the elixir vitæ, by which he has the power of renewing his youth. The romance has many attractions-splendid description and true pathos; its chief defect is an excess of the terrible. In 1800 Godwin produced his unlucky tragedy of Antonio; in 1801, Thoughts on Dr Parr's Spital Sermon, a reply to attacks made upon him, or on his code of morality, by Parr, Mackintosh, and others. In 1803 he brought out a Life of Chaucer, in two quartos. The Life of Chaucer was ridiculed by Scott in the Edinburgh Review for its enormous

bulk, minute details, and extraneous dissertations; but it is, for the time, a good and careful piece of work, exhibiting much sound criticism and a relish for true poetry. In 1804 came Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling. The title was unfortunate, as reminding the reader of the old Man of Feeling; this new one was self-willed and capricious, a morbid egotist, whose irritability, frantic outbursts of passion, and matrimonial troubles moved contempt rather than sympathy. The better parts of the novel consist of the episode of the Macneills, a tale of family pathos, and some detached descriptions of Welsh scenery. In 1801, after two unsuccessful courtships, Godwin had been married by the bustling widow, Mrs Clements or Clairmont, his next-door neighbour, who accosted him one day from her balcony: 'Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin!' She had two children already, and a third was born of the marriage. So in the family group as now constituted there were poor Fanny Imlay (1794-1816), who died by her own hand; Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (17971851), who in 1816 married Shelley; Charles Clairmont; Claire' Clairmont (1797-1879), the mother by Byron of Allegra; and William Godwin (1803-32), to whose posthumous novel, Transfusion, a memoir was prefixed by his father.

In 1805 Godwin, having opened a bookseller's shop in London, under the assumed name of 'Edward Baldwin,' sent forth a number of children's books, small histories and other compilations, some of them by himself; Charles Lamb mentions an English Grammar, in which Hazlitt assisted; and Lamb himself wrote a children's book, The King and Queen of Hearts (reprinted 1902). He tried another tragedy, Faulkner, in 1807, also unsuccessful. Next year he published an Essay on Sepulchres; and in 1815, Lives of Edward and John Phillips, the Nephews of Milton. He had paid a visit to Scotland, and engaged with Constable for another novel, Mandeville, a tale of the times of Cromwell (1817), measured and stately in style, and abounding in that moral anatomy which the author delighted in, but often carried beyond truth and nature. We next find Godwin combating the opinions of Malthus upon Population (1820), and then setting about an elaborate History of the Commonwealth (4 vols. 1824-28). The great men of that era were exactly suited to his taste, with their resolute energy of character, their triumphant hostility to monarchy, their republican enthusiasm, and strange notions of faith. Godwin evidently tasked himself to produce authorities for all he advanced. He took up, as might be expected, strong opinions; but in striving to be accurate and minute, he became too specific and chronological-it was truly said that the History 'creeps and hitches in dates and authorities.' In Cloudesley (1830) he found his new hero, like Caleb Williams, in humble life, and he set him against his patron; but there the parallel ends. The elastic vigour,

the verisimilitude, the crowding incidents, the absorbing interest, and the overwhelming catastrophe of Caleb Williams are not to be found in Cloudesley; there is even little delineation of character. Instead we have fine English, 'clouds of reflections without any new occasion to call them forth; an expanded flow of words without a single pointed remark.' The next thing was a metaphysical treatise, Thoughts on Man, &c.; and his last (1834) a compilation, Lives of the Necromancers. In 1833 the revolutionary author accepted the sinecure post of yeoman-usher of the Exchequer, conferred on him by Earl Grey's Ministry; and in the house attached to this appointment, in New Palace Yard, he ended his long and laborious life on 7th April 1836. From Old St Pancras church

From Portrait by John Opie, R. A., in the National Portrait Gallery. yard his body and Mary Wollstonecraft's were removed in 1851 to Bournemouth, where also rests Mrs Shelley.

The Life of Godwin (1876), by Mr Kegan Paul, is a valuable if over-eulogistic biography of one who in truth was largely a blend of Micawber and Pecksniff. Yet he unquestionably was one of the most remarkable and influential men of his times. The boldness of his speculations and opinions, his vehemence of feeling, and his irrepressible outspokenness were curiously contrasted with his plodding habits, his imperturbable temper, and the obscure humdrum of his daily life. The most startling and astounding theories were propounded by him with undoubting confidence; and sentiments that, if reduced to action, would have overturned the whole framework of society, were complacently dealt out by their author as if they had merely formed an ordinary portion of a busy literary life. Godwin never willingly destroyed a written line, and his biographer found a vast

quantity of letters and manuscripts, some never opened from the day they were laid aside by Godwin's own hand years before his death. The correspondence includes letters from Charles Lamb, Coleridge, Shelley, Wordsworth, Scott, Mackintosh, Lady Caroline Lamb, Mrs Inchbald, and others. The Life shows Godwin's powerful influence on Shelley and Bulwer Lytton; but it was reserved for a Frenchman, M. Émile Legouis, to show in La Jeunesse de Wordsworth (1896; Eng. trans. 1897) that 'The Prelude' and 'The Borderers' were as strongly Godwinian as the Lyrical Ballads' were anti-Godwinian.

Caleb Williams, the most interesting and original of Godwin's novels, is altogether a work of extraordinary art and power. It has the plainness of narrative and the apparent reality of the fictions of Defoe or Swift. Caleb Williams, an intelligent young peasant, is employed as secretary and kindly treated by a sombre and mysterious gentleman named Falkland. Half by chance and half from curiosity he discovers that his master has been guilty of a murder, for which he has allowed two innocent men to be hanged. His knowledge of this secret costs him a long and cruel persecution from Falkland, who at last has him arrested for theft. Driven to bay, Williams at his trial discloses the crime of his master, who dies of shame and despair, while the other is acquitted only to suffer agonies of remorse for sacrificing one who had been his benefactor.

Of the other novels of Godwin, St Leon alone will probably descend to posterity in company with Caleb Williams; though Godwin's romances have all a strong family likeness. If the impossible hypothesis on which St Leon is founded be admitted, then the subordinate incidents are natural and justly proportioned. The possessor of the philosopher's stone is an interesting visionary -a French Falkland of the sixteenth century, and as unfortunate, for his miraculous gifts entail but misery on himself and bring ruin to his family. Even exhaustless wealth is in itself no blessing; and this is the moral of the story. The character of the heroic Marguerite, wife of Leon, is one of the author's finest delineations. Bethlem Gabor is also a vigorous and striking sketch, though introduced too late in the novel to relieve flagging interest.

From 'Caleb Williams.'

I can conceive of no shock greater than that I received from the sight of Mr Falkland. His appearance on the last occasion on which we met had been haggard, ghostlike, and wild, energy in his gestures, and frenzy in his aspect. It was now the appearance of a corpse. He was brought in, in a chair, unable to stand, fatigued and almost destroyed by the journey he had just taken. His visage was colourless; his limbs destitute of motion, almost of life. His head reclined upon his bosom, except that now and then he lifted it up, and opened his eyes with a languid glance, immediately after which he sank back into his former apparent insensibility.

He seemed not to have three hours to live. He had kept his chamber for several weeks, but the summons of the magistrate had been delivered to him at his bedside, his orders respecting letters and written papers being so peremptory that no one dared to disobey them. Upon reading the paper, he was seized with a very dangerous fit; but as soon as he recovered, he insisted upon being conveyed, with all practicable expedition, to the place of appointment. Falkland, in the most helpless state, was still Falkland, firm in command, and capable to extort obedience from every one that approached him. What a sight was this to me! Here was Falkland, solemnly brought before a magistrate to answer to a charge of murder. Here I stood, having already declared myself the author of the charge, gravely and sacredly pledged to support it. This was my situation; and thus situated I was called upon immediately to act. My whole frame shook. I would eagerly have consented that that moment should have been the last of my existence. I, however, believed that the conduct now most indispensably incumbent on me was to lay the emotions of my soul naked before my hearers. I looked first at Mr Falkland, and then at the magistrate and attendants, and then at Mr Falkland again. My voice was suffocated with agony. I began: Would to God it were possible for me to retire from this scene without uttering another word! I would brave the consequences -I would submit to any imputation of cowardice, falsehood, and profligacy, rather than add to the weight of misfortune with which Mr Falkland is overwhelmed. But the situation, and the demands of Mr Falkland himself, forbid me. He in compassion for whose fallen state I would willingly forget every interest of my own, would compel me to accuse, that he might enter upon his justification. I will confess every sentiment of my heart. Mr Falkland well knows-I affirm it in his presence-how unwillingly I have proceeded to this extremity. I have reverenced him; he was worthy of reverence. From the first moment I saw him, I conceived the most ardent admiration. He condescended to encourage me; I attached myself to him with the fullness of affection. He was unhappy; I exerted myself with youthful curiosity to discover the secret of his This was the beginning of misfortune. What shall I say? He was indeed the murderer of Tyrrel! He suffered the Hawkinses to be executed, knowing that they were innocent, and that he alone was guilty! After successive surmises, after various indiscretions on my part, and indications on his, he at length confided to me at full the fatal tale! Mr Falkland! I most solemnly conjure you to recollect yourself! Did I ever prove myself unworthy of your confidence? The secret was a most painful burden to me it was the extremest folly that led me unthinkingly to gain possession of it; but I would have died a thousand deaths rather than betray it. It was the jealousy of your own thoughts, and the weight that hung upon your mind, that led you to watch my motions, and conceive alarm from every particle of my conduct. You began in confidence—why did you not continue in confidence? . . . I fell at last into the hands of the miscreants. In this terrible situation I, for the first time, attempted, by turning informer, to throw the weight from myself. Happily for me, the London magistrate listened to my tale with insolent contempt. I soon, and long, repented of my rashness, and rejoiced

woe.