FRANCIS, son of Dr Godwin, bishop of Bath and Wells, was born at Havington, Northamptonshire, in 1661. After passing through the usual course of grammar-school instruction, he was sent to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he took his degree of bachelor in 1580, and that of master of arts in 1583. About this time he wrote an amusing piece on a philosophical subject, which he never published, but which appeared about five years after his death, under the title of The Man in the Moon, or a discourse of a Voyage thither, by Domingo Gonzalez, 1638, in 8vo. This satirical production, which displays considerable fancy and even genius, seems to have afforded to Swift several hints of which he availed himself in his voyage to Laputa; and, what is still more remarkable, it shows the author to have been acquainted with the Copernican system. He also suppressed another piece, entitled Nuncius Inanimatus, or the Inanimate Messenger, intended to communicate various methods for conveying intelligence secretly, speedily, and safely; a production which appears to have been the prototype of Bishop Wilkin's Mercury, or Secret and Swift Messenger. It was published, however, in 1657, and afterwards translated by Dr Thomas Smith. Some time after he had taken his degree, Godwin entered into holy orders, and soon became rector of Samford-Orcais in Somersetshire, a prebendary in the church of Wilts, and canon-residentiary, also vicar of Weston-in-Zoyland, in the same county. Having turned his attention to the subject of British antiquities, he became acquainted with Camden, whom he accompanied in a journey through Wales in 1590, in search of curiosities; but, although he took great pleasure in these inquiries, he at length confined himself entirely to ecclesiastical history and antiquities. He was created bachelor of divinity in 1593, and doctor in 1595, when, having resigned the vicarage of Weston, he was appointed rector of Bishop's-Lidiard in the same county.

In 1601 he published his Catalogue of the Bishops of England, since the first planting of the Christian religion in this island—a work in which he embodied his collections in ecclesiastical biography, and which, through the intercession of Lord Buckhurst, to whom he acted as chaplain, procured him the bishopric of Llandaff. In 1615 he published another edition, with numerous alterations and additions; but this having been very erroneously printed, owing to the author's distance from the press, he recast the whole in an elegant Latin dress, and the year after sent it abroad to be printed. This last edition was dedicated to the king, who, in return, conferred upon him the bishopric of Hereford, to which he was translated in 1617. The work was afterwards reprinted, in the year 1743, with a continuation by Dr Richardson, the whole being in one volume folio, with a portrait of Godwin, and other embellishments. In 1616 he published, in Latin, Resum Anglicarum Henrico VIII., etc., episcoporum, which was translated and published by his son, under the title of Annals of England, containing the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Queen Mary, in folio. His last publication was a Compendium of the Value of the Roman Sestertes and Attic Talent, which appeared in the year 1639.

After this he fell into a languishing disorder, which cut him off in April 1633.

(GODWIN, WILLIAM, an English author of great versatility, original power, and unwearied application, was the son of a dissenting minister, and was born at Wisbeach, Cambridge, March 3, 1756. He was educated for his father's profession, and afterwards officiated for four years as pastor of a congregation at Stowmarket in Suffolk. Many of the English dissenting ministers were at this time zealous political reformers. They felt the Test and Corporation Acts to be badges of persecution, and naturally wished to abate somewhat of the power of the High-church clergy and rural aristocracy, by whom they were regarded with suspicion and dislike. Godwin participated in these sentiments, but went much further than most of his brethren. He aimed at the complete overthrow of all existing institutions, political, social, and religious. An intellectual republic was the dream of his youthful ambition; and to promote its anticipated advent he resigned his clerical charge, repaired to London, and set about the work of regeneration with his pen, which at all times he valued as highly as ever monarch did his sceptre. This was in 1782, and the same year Godwin commenced his career as author by publishing a series of six sermons entitled Sketches of History. He wrote largely in the Annual Register and other periodicals, and associated with Horne Tooke, Holcroft, Thelwall, and others who, from their political doctrines and activity, were obnoxious to men in power. Godwin, however, was no platform agitator. He was the mildest of enthusiastic philosophers, and had no talent or inclination for public life. In 1793 appeared his greatest work on political science, The Inquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Godwin. General Virtue and Happiness. Though now rarely met with, this work was read with great avidity, and exercised no small influence in shaping the opinions and aspirations of many young men of genius, who were captivated with the author's argument for universal benevolence as the immediate motive of our actions, and the true basis on which to found society. The French Revolution had then run its wildest excesses, and appeared rather as a beacon to warn off political adventurers than a light to steer by; but Godwin conceived that he could build upon the ruins of monarchy a glorious fabric of equal rights and happiness for all mankind. Still further to illustrate his peculiar views, and show the evils of our artificial system, he wrote and published next year his political novel of Things as they are, or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, which, with the other tales of Godwin, will be found noticed under the head of Romance. The political object of Caleb Williams was overlooked by the mass of readers in the strong interest of the story, and in the author's vivid description of incidents and character. It is a work of great genius, and was the most popular of all Godwin's productions. His next important effort to propagate his opinions was in the form of a series of essays entitled the Inquirer, which appeared in 1796. A more remarkable exemplification of his views on social questions was afforded by his Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman. This was the once celebrated Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin had married, though neither approved of the "slavery" of wedlock. The details and principles laid bare in this memoir shocked even Godwin's philosophical admirers. He had gone too far for English feeling, however modified by political sentiments; and though his own equanimity was probably never for a moment disturbed by the comments his work provoked, his position, both as a literary man and a citizen, was lowered by the publication. His next appearance was in the field of fiction. His St Leon, a tale of the sixteenth century, was published in 1799; and though the subject was avowedly of the miraculous class (his hero being invested with the fabulous powers of alchemy and the elixir vitae, by which he commands all riches, and can renew his youth), the work contains many splendid and pathetic descriptions. The utter desolation of St Leon, who survives all the objects of his affection, and longs for dissolution notwithstanding his supernatural endowments, is one of the most powerful and harrowing pictures in the whole region of romance. The other works of Godwin during his long literary life were, Antonio, a tragedy, produced in 1801; a Life of Chaucer, in two quarto volumes—filled, of course, by a vast amount of episodical description and illustration—published in 1803; Fleetwood, a novel, 1805; Faulkner, a tragedy, 1807; an Essay on Sepulchres, 1809; Lives of Edward and John Philips, the nephews of Milton, 1815; Manderville, a tale of the times of Cromwell, 1817; a History of the Commonwealth, in four volumes, published at intervals between 1824 and 1828; Clodestley, a novel, 1830; and Lives of the Necromancers, 1834. Many other short and anonymous works proceeded from his ever-busy hand. For some years Godwin carried on business as a bookseller under the name of Edward Baldwin, and ushered into the world a number of small educational works. Into such humble usefulness had subsided the daring and sanguine speculator, who was to overturn thrones, and regenerate the civilized world! Misfortune seems to have fallen upon him about the year 1816, as at that time we find Byron concerning with Mackintosh and Rogers as to some measures for his relief. In his latter years the government of Earl Grey conferred upon Mr Godwin a small office known as "Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer," to which were attached apartments in Palace Yard; and there the veteran author died, April 7, 1836, having completed his eightieth year. From the glimpses of Godwin's familiar life afforded by Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, and other associates, he appears to have been an easy complacent man, esteeming literature above all pursuits and distinctions, and enjoying his game of whist in the evenings with a few select and congenial friends. His latter works are distinguished by great elegance of style. Details are worked up with brilliancy and effect in his essays and novels; though in the delineation of passion he is often exaggerated and unnatural. His History of the Commonwealth disappointed the public. The subject was one that seemed peculiarly suited to his genius and research, but he taxed himself to be rigidly accurate and impartial; and in the process, he had neglected the animation and colouring necessary to give life and interest to his narrative. The work, however, is a valuable repository of facts. The theory of political optimism by which Godwin was first distinguished was successfully answered by Malthus and Dr Parr. It has been fairly refuted on philosophical principles. In excluding the particular affections, he deprives us, as Sydney Smith has remarked, of our most powerful means of promoting his own principle of universal good—"For it is as much as to say that all the crew ought to have the general welfare of the ship so much at heart that no sailor should pull any particular rope, or hand any individual sail." A theory which runs counter to the natural feelings, habits, and business of mankind, can only be considered as one of the refinements of sophistry, put forth at a time of peculiar excitement and speculation. It is in the regions of fiction that Godwin earned his lasting and most distinctive laurels. As a general writer on so many classes of subjects, he is well entitled to honourable mention, but in romance only is he original and striking. His political theories and elaborate essays are already left behind in the onward progress of society in practical government and knowledge. A work of genius, however, such as Caleb Williams or St Leon, which appeals to the heart and imagination, and evinces the skill of the master, can never become uninteresting. (p. c—s.)

Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, an English authoress of the last century, celebrated for her literary talents, her opinions, and her misfortunes. She was born in 1759, either in the environs of London, or at Loddon in Norfolk, where it is known that her father was in practice as a surgeon and apothecary not long after her birth. In 1768 she accompanied her father to Beverley in Yorkshire, where the only education she got was that afforded by the humble day-schools of the town. This was of itself sufficient to disgust her with the life she was obliged to lead; and her unhappiness was embittered by the cruel treatment of her father, who was a man of ill-regulated mind and ungovernable temper. "Mary Wollstonecraft was not formed," says the author of Caleb Williams in the memoir of his wife, "to be the unresisting and contented subject of a despot; but I have heard her remark more than once, that when she felt she had done wrong, the reproof or chastisement of her mother, instead of being a terror to her, she found to be the only thing capable of reconciling her to herself." The blows of her father, on the contrary, which were the mere ebullitions of a passionate temper, instead of humbling her, roused her indignation. She resolved to provide for herself; and on the death of her mother, went to live as a companion with a lady in Bath. In 1783, along with two of her sisters and a friend, she opened a school, first at Islington and afterwards at Newington Green. She was succeeding well in a very congenial sphere, when the news reached her of the serious illness of her attached friend at Lisbon, whom she instantly set off to nurse in her dying moments. On her return she found her school ruined by mismanagement, and was obliged to enter as governess the family of Lord Kingsborough. She had already made herself favourably known as an authoress by a little work On the Education of Daughters, published in 1786. The success of this work tempted her to London to seek a livelihood there by her pen. During three or four years she was able not only to maintain herself but to educate two younger sisters, and prop up the fortunes of the family, which the imprudence of her father now threatened to involve in ruin. She contributed largely to the periodical press, and translated Lavater's Physiognomy, Salzman's Elements of Morality, and other works. In 1791 she emerged all at once into a publicity that was at once fame and notoriety by publishing an answer to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, and her still more noted Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the latter work she maintains, as might be inferred from its title, that woman is called by nature to share with man the lofty functions which he has arrogated exclusively to himself; that man has no other superiority over the weaker sex than that of physical strength; and has over the left. But the supposition, the very case put, that it is only through the devotedness of her love that woman has fallen into that degradation in which the authorship believes her now to be. In 1792 she passed over convulsed, if any ever was, by an almost total anarchy, into France, with the idea, as she expressed it, "of losing it is a fact notorious to all who take an interest in German literature, and its concerns, that Goethe did in one way or another, through the length and breadth of that vast country, establish a supremacy of influence wholly unexampled; a supremacy indeed perilous in a less honourable man, to those whom he might chance to hate, and with regard to himself thus far unfortunate, that it conferred upon every work proceeding from his pen a sort of papal indulgence, an immunity from criticism, or even from the appeals of good sense, such as it is not wholesome that any man should enjoy. Yet we repeat that German literature was and is in a condition of total anarchy: with this solitary exception, no name, even in the most narrow section of knowledge or of power, has ever been able in that country to challenge unconditional reverence; whereas, with us and in France, name the science, name the art, and we will name the dominant professor; a difference which partly arises out of the fact that England and France are governed in their opinions by two or three capital cities, whilst Germany looks for its leadership to as many cities as there are residencies and universities: for instance, the little territory with which Goethe was connected presented no less than two such public lights; Weimar, the residenz or privileged abode of the Grand Duke, and Jena, the university founded by that house. Partly, however, this difference may be due to the greater restlessness, and to the greater energy as respects mere speculation, of the German mind. But no matter whence arising, or how interpreted, the fact is what we have described: absolute confusion, the "anarch old" of Milton, is the one deity whose sceptre is there paramount; and yet there it was, in that very realm of chaos, that Goethe built his throne. That he must have looked with trepidation and perplexity upon his wild empire and its "dark foundations," may be supposed. The tenure was uncertain to him as regarded its duration; to us it is equally uncertain, and in fact mysterious, as regards its origin. Meantime the mere fact, contrasted with the general tendencies of the German literary world, is sufficient to justify a notice, somewhat circumstantial, of the man in whose favour, whether naturally by force of genius, or by accident concurring with intrigue, so unexampled a result was effected.

Goethe was born at noonday on the 28th of August 1749, in his father's house at Frankfort on the Maine. The circumstances of his birth were thus far remarkable, that, unless Goethe's vanity deceived him, they led to a happy revolution hitherto retarded by female delicacy falsely directed. From some error of the midwife who attended his mother, the infant Goethe appeared to be still born. Sons there were as yet none from this marriage; everybody was therefore interested in the child's life; and the panic which arose in consequence, having sur- Goethe, vived its immediate occasion, was improved into a public resolution (for which no doubt society stood ready at that moment) to found some course of public instruction from this time forward for those who undertook professionally the critical duties of accoucheur.

We have noticed the house in which Goethe was born, as well as the city. Both were remarkable, and fitted to leave lasting impressions upon a young person of sensibility. As to the city, its antiquity is not merely venerable, but almost mysterious; towers were at that time to be found in the mouldering lines of its earliest defences, which belonged to the age of Charlemagne, or one still earlier; battlements adapted to a mode of warfare anterior even to that of feudalism or romance. The customs, usages, and local privileges of Frankfort, and the rural districts adjacent, were of a corresponding character. Festivals were annually celebrated at a short distance from the walls, which had descended from a dateless antiquity. Every thing which met the eye spoke the language of elder ages; whilst the river on which the place was seated, its great fair, which still held the rank of the greatest in Christendom, and its connection with the throne of Caesar and his inauguration, by giving to Frankfort an interest and a public character in the eyes of all Germany, had the effect of countersigning, as it were, by state authority, the importance which she otherwise challenged to her ancestral distinctions. Fit house for such a city, and in due keeping with the general scenery, was that of Goethe's father. It had in fact been composed out of two contiguous houses; that accident had made it spacious and rambling in its plan; whilst a further irregularity had grown out of the original difference in point of level between the corresponding stories of the two houses, making it necessary to connect the rooms of the same suite by short flights of steps. Some of these features were no doubt removed by the recast of the house under the name of "repairs" (to evade a city bye-law), afterwards executed by his father; but such was the house of Goethe's infancy, and in all other circumstances of style and furnishing equally antique.

The spirit of society in Frankfort, without a court, a university, or a learned body of any extent, or a resident nobility in its neighbourhood, could not be expected to display any very high standard of polish. Yet, on the other hand, as an independent city, governed by its own separate laws and tribunals (that privilege of autonomy so dearly valued by ancient Greece) and possessing besides a resident corps of jurisprudents and of agents in various ranks for managing the interests of the German emperor and other princes, Frankfort had the means within herself of giving a liberal tone to the pursuits of her superior citizens, and of co-operating in no inconsiderable degree with the general movement of the times, political or intellectual. The memoirs of Goethe himself, and in particular the picture there given of his own family, as well as other contemporary glimpses of German domestic society in those days, are sufficient to show that much knowledge, much true cultivation of mind, much sound refinement of taste, were then distributed through the middle classes of German society; meaning by that very indeterminate expression those classes which for Frankfort composed the aristocracy, viz. all who had daily leisure, and regular funds for employing it to advantage. It is not necessary to add, because that is a fact applicable to all stages of society, that Frankfort presented many and various specimens of original talent, moving upon all directions of human speculation.

Yet, with this general allowance made for the capacities of the place, it is too evident that, for the most part, they lay inert and undeveloped. In many respects Frankfort resembled an English cathedral city, according to the standard of such places seventy years ago, not, that is to say, like Carlisle in this day, where a considerable manufacture exists, but like Chester as it is yet. The chapter of a cathedral, the resident ecclesiastics attached to the duties of so large an establishment, men always well educated, and generally having families, compose the original nucleus, around which soon gathers all that part of the local gentry who, for any purpose, whether of education for their children, or of social enjoyment for themselves, seek the advantages of a town. Hither resort all the timid old ladies who wish for conversation, or other forms of social amusement; hither resort the valetudinarians, male or female, by way of commanding superior medical advice at a cost not absolutely ruinous to themselves; and multitudes besides, with narrow incomes, to whom these quiet retreats are so many cities of refuge.

Such, in one view, they really are; and yet in another they have a vicious constitution. Cathedral cities in England, imperial cities without manufactures in Germany, are all in an improgressive condition. The public employments of every class in such places continue the same from generation to generation. The amount of superior families oscillates rather than changes; that is, it fluctuates within fixed limits; and, for all inferior families, being composed either of shopkeepers or of menial servants, they are determined by the number, or, which, on a large average, is the same, by the pecuniary power, of their employers. Hence it arises, that room is made for one man, in whatever line of dependence, only by the death of another; and the constant increments of the population are carried off into other cities. Not less is the difference of such cities as regards the standard of manners: how striking is the soft and urbane tone of the lower orders in a cathedral city, or in a watering place dependent upon ladies, contrasted with the bold, often insolent, demeanour of a self-dependent artisan or mutinous mechanic of Manchester and Glasgow.

Children, however, are interested in the state of society around them chiefly as it affects their parents. Those of Goethe were respectable, and perhaps tolerably representative of the general condition in their own rank. An English authoress of great talent, in her Characteristics of Goethe, has too much countenanced the notion that he owed his intellectual advantages exclusively to his mother. Of this there is no proof. His mother wins more esteem from the reader of this day, because she was a cheerful woman, of serene temper, brought into advantageous comparison with a husband much older than herself, whom circumstances had rendered moody, fitful, sometimes capricious, and confessedly obstinate in that degree which Pope has taught us to think connected with inveterate error:

Stiff in opinion, always in the wrong,

unhappily presents an association too often actually occurring in nature, to leave much chance for error in presuming either quality from the other. And, in fact, Goethe's father was so uniformly obstinate in pressing his own views upon all who belonged to him, whenever he did come forward in an attitude of activity, that his family had much reason to be thankful for the rarity of such displays. Fortunately for them, his indolence neutralized his obstinacy. And the worst shape in which his troublesome temper showed itself, was in what concerned the religious reading of the family. Once begun, the worst book as well as the best, the longest no less than the shortest, was to be steadfastly read through to the last word of the last volume; no excess of yawning availed to obtain a reprieve, not, adds his son, though he were himself the leader of the yawners. As an illustration, he mentions Bowyer's History of the Popes; which awful series of records, the Goethe, catacombs, as it were, in the palace of history, were actually traversed from one end to the other of the endless suite by the unfortunate house of Goethe. Allowing, however, for the father's unamiableness in this one point, upon all intellectual ground both parents seem to have met very much upon a level. Two illustrations may suffice, one of which occurred during the infancy of Goethe. The science of education was at that time making its first rude motions towards an ampler development; and, amongst other reforms then floating in the general mind, was one for eradicating the childish fear of ghosts, &c. The young Goethes, as it happened, slept not in separate beds only, but in separate rooms; and not unfrequently the poor children, under the stinging terrors of their lonely situation, stole away from their "forms," to speak in the hunter's phrase, and sought to rejoin each other. But in these attempts they were liable to surprises from the enemy; papa and mamma were both on the alert, and often intercepted the young deserter by a cross march or an ambuscade; in which cases each had a separate policy for enforcing obedience. The father, upon his general system of "perseverance," compelled the fugitive back to his quarters, and, in effect, exhorted him to persist in being frightened out of his wits. To his wife's gentle heart that course appeared cruel, and she reclaimed the delinquent by bribes; the peaches which her garden walls produced being the fund from which she chiefly drew her supplies for this branch of the secret service. What were her winter bribes, when the long nights would seem to lie heaviest on the exchequer, is not said. Speaking seriously, no man of sense can suppose that a course of suffering from terrors the most awful, under whatever influence supported, whether under the naked force of compulsion, or of that connected with bribes, could have any final effect in mitigating the passion of awe, connected, by our very dreams, with the shadowy and the invisible, or in tranquillizing the infantine imagination.

A second illustration involves a great moral event in the history of Goethe, as it was, in fact, the first occasion of his receiving impressions at war with his religious creed. Piety is so beautiful an ornament of the youthful mind, doubt or distrust so unnatural a growth from confiding innocence, that an infant freethinker is heard of not so much with disgust as with perplexity. A sense of the ludicrous is apt to intermingle; and we lose our natural horror of the result in wonder at its origin. Yet in this instance there is no room for doubt; the fact and the occasion are both on record; there can be no question about the date; and, finally, the accuser is no other than the accused. Goethe's own pen it which proclaims, that already, in the early part of his seventh year, his reliance upon God as a moral governor had suffered a violent shock, was shaken, if not undermined. On the 1st of November 1755 occurred the great earthquake at Lisbon. Upon a double account, this event occupied the thoughts of all Europe for an unusual term of time; both as an expression upon a larger scale than usual of the mysterious physical agency concerned in earthquakes, and also for the awful human tragedy which attended either the earthquake itself, or its immediate sequel in the sudden irruption of the Tagus. Sixty thousand persons, victims to the dark power in its first or its second avatar, attested the Titanic scale upon which it worked. Here it was that the shallow piety of the Germans found a stumbling-block. Those who have read any circumstantial history of the physical signs which preceded this earthquake, are aware that in England and Northern Germany many singular phenomena were observed, more or less manifestly connected with the same dark agency which terminated at Lisbon, and running before this final catastrophe at times so accurately varying with the distances, as to furnish something like a scale for measuring the velocity with which it moved. These German phenomena, circulated rapidly over all Germany by the journals of every class, had seemed to give to the Germans a nearer and more domestic interest in the great event, than belonged to them merely in their universal character of humanity. It is also well known to observers of national characteristics, that amongst the Germans the household charities, the piety of the hearth, as they may be called, exist, if not really in greater strength, yet with much less of the usual balances or restraints. A German father, for example, is like the grandfather of other nations; and thus a piety, which in its own nature scarcely seems liable to excess, takes, in its external aspect, too often an air of effeminate imbecility. These two considerations are necessary to explain the intensity with which this Lisbon tragedy laid hold of the German mind, and chiefly under the one single aspect of its undistinguishing fury. Women, children, old men—these, doubtless, had been largely involved in the perishing sixty thousand; and that reflection, it would seem from Goethe's account, had so far embittered the sympathy of the Germans with their distant Portuguese brethren, that, in the Frankfort discussions, sulky murmurs had gradually ripened into bold impeachments of Providence. There can be no gloomier form of infidelity than that which questions the moral attributes of the Great Being in whose hands are the final destinies of us all. Such, however, was the form of Goethe's earliest scepticism, such its origin; caught up from the very echoes which rang through the streets of Frankfort when the subject occupied all men's minds; and such, for any thing that appears, continued to be its form thenceforwards to the close of his life, if speculations so crude could be said to have any form at all. Many are the analogies, some close ones, between England and Germany with regard to the circle of changes they have run through, political or social, for a century back. The challenges are frequent to a comparison; and sometimes the result would be to the advantage of Germany, more often to ours. But in religious philosophy, which in reality is the true popular philosophy, how vast is the superiority on the side of this country. Not a shopkeeper or mechanic, we may venture to say, but would have felt this obvious truth, that surely the Lisbon earthquake yielded no fresh lesson, no peculiar moral, beyond what belonged to every man's experience in every age. A passage in the New Testament about the fall of the tower of Siloam, and the just construction of that event, had already anticipated the difficulty, if such it could be thought. Not to mention, that calamities upon the same scale in the earliest age of Christianity, the fall of the amphitheatre at Fidenae, or the destruction of Pompeii, had presented the same problem as the Lisbon earthquake. Nay, it is presented daily in the humblest individual case, where wrong is triumphant over right, or innocence confounded with guilt in one common disaster. And that the parents of Goethe should have authorized his error, if only by their silence, argues a degree of ignorance in them which could not have co-existed with much superior knowledge in the public mind.