traditional credit of having directly inspired Godwin.  Godwin himself acknowledged the obligation; indeed it is well known that—­in pecuniary matters more particularly—­Godwin had no hesitation either in incurring or in acknowledging obligations, always provided that he was not expected to discharge them.  It is possible that Holcroft’s rough and ready acceptance and exaggeration of the doctrines which Rousseau had (as seems most probable) developed from a paradox of Diderot’s, gave an impetus to the rather sluggish but more systematic mind of Godwin.  But it is certain that Political Justice, though it is not a novel at all, is a much more amusing book than Anna St. Ives, which is one.  And though Holcroft (especially if the presence of this quality in his Autobiography is not wholly due to Hazlitt—­there is some chance that it is) possessed a liveliness in narrative to which Godwin could never attain, there is no doubt that this enigmatical and many-sided spunger, philanderer, and corruptor of youth had a much higher general qualification for novel-writing than any one mentioned hitherto in this chapter, or perhaps than any to be mentioned, except the curiously contrasted pair, of Irish birth, who are to come last in it.

I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin’s power in this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not share it, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to have been held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the author of Waverley.  To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as that Bacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the Tale of a Tub:  but if, instead of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the absurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances.  There are some who, of course, would say, “Why take this fanciful test of Godwin’s ability when you have a real one in Caleb Williams?” The reasons are double:  for, historically, such an estimate by contemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer Caleb Williams (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book.  It is impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowest of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness:  and my sense of natural justice (which is different from Godwin’s) demands not that he shall escape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow fire, or made to read Political Justice after the novelty of its colossal want of humour has palled on him.  One could sympathise with Falkland, but is not allowed to do so:  because he is not human, except in his crime.  But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interests are excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no doubt do not occur.  After all Caleb is, in a sense, the first “detective novel”:  and detective novels have always been popular, though they bore some people to extinction.  Far, however,