These years were crowded with literary work, for neither "Baldwin" nor Godwin allowed their common pen to idle. Two elaborate historical works enjoyed and deserved a great reputation in their day, though subsequent research has rendered them obsolete--a _Life of Geoffrey Chaucer_ (1803) and a _History of the Commonwealth of England from its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles II._ (1824-8). It is not easy for modern taste to do justice to Godwin's novels; but on them his contemporary fame chiefly rested, and publishers paid for them high though diminishing prices. They all belong to the romantic movement; some have a supernatural basis, and most of them discover a too obvious didactic purpose. _St. Leon_ (1799), almost as popular in its day as _Caleb Williams_, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections which _Political Justice_ had depreciated. _Fleetwood_ (1805) makes war on debauchery with sincere and impressive dulness. _Mandeville_ (1817), _Cloudesley_ (1830) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are dead beyond the reach of curiosity, yet the Radical critics of his day, including Hazlitt, tried hard to convince themselves that Godwin was a greater novelist than the Tory, Scott. It remains to mention Godwin's two attempts to conquer the theatre with _Antonio_ (1800) and _Faulkener_ (1807). Neither play lived, and _Antonio_, written in a sort of journalese, cut up into blank verse lines, was too frigid to survive the first night. Godwin's disappointment would be comical if it were not painful. He regarded these deplorable tragedies as the flower of his genius.
Through these years of misfortune and eclipse, the friendships which Godwin could still retain were his chief consolation. The published letters of Coleridge and Lamb make a charming record of their intimacy. Whimsical and affectionate in their tone, they are an unconscious tribute as much to the man who received them as to the men who wrote them. Conservative critics have talked of Godwin's "coldness" because he could reason. But the abiding and generous regard of such a nature as Charles Lamb's is answer enough to these summary valuations. But Godwin's most characteristic relationship was with the young men who sought him out as an inspiration. He would write them long letters of advice, encouragement, and criticism, and despite his own poverty, would often relieve their distresses. The most interesting of them was an adventurous young Scot named Arnot who travelled on foot through the greater part of Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The tragedy which seemed always to pursue Godwin's intimates drove another of them, Patrickson, to suicide while an undergraduate at Cambridge. Bulwer Lytton, the last of these admiring young men, left a note on Godwin's conversational powers in his extreme old age, which assures us that he was "well worth hearing," even amid the brilliance of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt, and could display "a grim jocularity of sarcasm."