William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing, though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics; and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to Godwin for having written the tragedy of _Antonio_; for not only was it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism. Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:
'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who, during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the stage.'
'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions that your language is false or intolerable English. The second marks the passages that struck me as _flat_ or mean. The third is a note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book language. The last mark implies bad metre.'