revealed in his life published some years ago by Mr. Kegan Paul. The subject was not altogether an easy one to manage. Some people shine, as it were, by their own light. There are others, of whom Godwin was one, who become interesting only when the observer is prepared to look at him from the right point of view. Lowell, in speaking of the inimitable Pepys, calls him an 'unconscious humourist.' The diary, that is, has all the effect of humorous writing, but the writer did not intend to produce a smile, and made his quaint confessions as if they would be to his readers, as they were to him, just the most natural things in the world. The reader, however, has to supply a great deal more from his own resources in the case of Godwin. He reminds us of a familiar difficulty which besets writers of fiction. When they introduce a bore for the sake of the comic effect of his tediousness, the tediousness is very apt to tire the reader. Now Pepys had infinitely too much vivacity ever to have been a bore, but Godwin, as I have said, was a bore by nature. Everybody, I hold, is a bore to some people, but Godwin was one of the unlucky persons capable of boring all round. He can never be amusing taken by himself, and we have to make
