REMARKS ON "MANDEVILLE" AND MR. GODWIN.[1]
The author of "Mandeville" is one of the most
illustrious examples of intellectual power of the
present age. He has exhibited that variety and
universality of talent which distinguishes him who is
destined to inherit lasting renown, from the possessors
of temporary celebrity. If his claims were to be
measured solely by the accuracy of his researches into
ethical and political science, still it would be difficult
to name a contemporary competitor. Let us make a
deduction of all those parts of his moral system which
are liable to any possible controversy, and consider
simply those which only to allege is to establish, and
which belong to that most important class of truths
which he that announces to mankind seems less to
teach than to recall.
"Political Justice" is the first moral system explicitly founded upon the doctrine of the negativeness of rights and the positiveness of duties,—an obscure feeling of which has been the basis of all the political liberty and private virtue in the world. But he is also the author of "Caleb Williams"; and if we had no record of a mind, but simply some fragment containing the conception of the character of Falkland, doubtless we should say, "This is an extraordinary mind, and undoubtedly was capable of the very sublimest enterprises of thought."
St. Leon and Fleetwood are moulded with somewhat inferior distinctness, in the same character of a union of delicacy and power. The Essay on Sepulchres has all the solemnity and depth of passion which belong to a mind that sympathises, as one man with his friend in the interest of future ages, in the concerns of the vanished generations of mankind.
It may be said with truth, that Godwin has been
- ↑ From The Shelley Papers, 1833.
