¹ It is indicative of the bitterness of public feeling against revolutionary thinkers that Godwin, fearing that the failure of Antonio would be inevitable, if its authorship were known, undertook to have it passed off as the work of his friend, Mr. Tobin, and arranged with John Kemble that Mr. Tobin should attend the rehearsals so as to produce the impression that he was the author. Kegan Paul, William Godwin (2 vols., London, 1876, ii, ch. iii). See also the present writer's article, The Reaction against William Godwin, Modern Philology, vol. xvi, no. 5.

For similar reasons Thomas Holcroft had to resort more than once to a similar device. His comedy, He's Much to Blame, was presented to the theatre in the name of a friend. That his play, The Deserted Daughter, was not received with hostility Holcroft attributed to the fact that on the occasion of its first performance its author was not known to the public. (Memoirs, 3 vols., London, 1816, ii, pp. 213, 219).

Lamb's account of the failure of Godwin's Antonio is a classic. Anna Seward, the Minerva of Lichfield, had the greatest expectations of the play when she received the volumes with leaves still uncut. “The characteristic strength, the depth of thought, the heart-grappling interest, and the terrible graces of Caleb Williams and St. Leon will nobly support the tragic muse. Yes; they will revive her laurels, withered, and in the dust, since Jephson forsook her—O, my stars, what short-lived exultation ! How are the mighty fallen and the weapons of genius blunted!” (Letters, 6 vols., Edinburgh, 1811, vol. v, Letter lix.)

² History of the American Theatre (2 vols., London, 1833), I, pp. 312, 371. Dunlap scornfully refers to “all the smoke, noise and nonsense belonging to Mr. John Burk's muse.”

³ Dunlap, and Professor Brander Matthews repeats the mistake in the preface of his edition of Bunker Hill (Publications of the Dunlap Society, vol. xv, 1891), errs in listing Female Patriotism and Joan d'Arc as two separate plays. Professor Quinn gives the title correctly in Cambridge History of American Literature, i, p. 496.

⁴ Some Materials to serve for a Brief Memoir of John Daly Burk, edited by Charles Campbell, Albany, 1868, pp. 43 ff.

⁵ History of the American Theatre, ii, p. 294.

⁶ For the episode of Bethlem Gabor see St. Leon, A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, London, 1831, ch. xxxvii-xlii inclusive.

⁷ For a fuller discussion of the significance of St. Leon see article by present writer, William Godwin as a Sentimentalist in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, xxxiii (1918), pp. 1-29.

⁸ The following judgments of St. Leon are instructive because they reveal how the novel impressed those of Godwin's contemporaries who felt the appeal of its humanitarianism and its typically romantic delineation of Titanism:

“What a picture of terrific sublimity is exhibited in the person of Bethlem Gabor! I contemplated it with awe, and my aversion to such utter extinction of sympathy in an human heart was subdued by the grandeur which envelopes every lineament of his ferocity.”— Rev. T. S. Whalley in Anna Seward's Letters, vol. v, Letter li.

“ Your Bethlem Gabor is wonderfully drawn. It is like the figures of Michel Angelo, any section of an outline of which taken apart would be improbable and false, but which are so combined to form a sublime whole. Having read I could coldly come back, and point to the caricature traits of the portrait, but while reading I could feel nothing but astonishment and admiration.”—Thomas Holcroft, in Kegan Paul's William Godwin, ii, p. 25.

On one occasion Byron asked Godwin why he did not write another novel. Godwin, then an old man, protested that the effort would mean his death. Byron replied: “And what matter? We should have another St. Leon.”—Gallery of Literary Portraits in Frazer's Magazine for Town and Country, Oct., 1834.

⁹ In 1835 John Hobart Caunter published his play St. Leon. So far as I have been able to discover, it was never produced, and after reading it, I was not surprised. As in the case of Burk's treatment of his material in Bethlem Gabor, Caunter, in dramatizing Godwin's novel, has stripped it of its humanitarian significance. All that he retains are the melodramatic elements, the familiar features of a sensational Gothic romance.

¹⁰ History of the Late War in Ireland with An Account of the United Irish Association, Philadelphia, 1799.

Some Materials to serve for a Brief Memoir of John Daly Burk, edited by Charles Campbell, Albany, 1868.

Of these two sources for Burk's life, the first contains autobiographical material of which commentators have apparently not availed themselves. Moreover, at the back of this pamphlet is a list of those works of Burk, nineteen in all, which the Philadelphia publisher Bailey intended to issue in a collected edition. This list, including poems, prose works, and plays, contains titles which, as far as I know, are unfamiliar to students of the period. The most noteworthy items are:

1. 1.

   1. Trial and Defence before the Board of the College from which he was expelled—

2. 2.

   2. A Treatise on Government.

3. 3.

   3. Prince of Susa: A Tragedy.

4. 4.

   4. Island of Calypso: a Pantomimic Drama, with occasional Song and Dialogue.

5. 5.

   5. The Exile: A Tragedy. Never printed or performed.

¹¹ See Mrs. Shelley's note in Kegan Paul's William Godwin, i, p. 36.

¹² William W. Clapp, A Record of the Boston Stage, 1853, p. 62.

¹³ History of the American Theatre, I, pp. 301, 341 ff.

¹⁴ Retrospections of America, New York, 1887, p. 267.

¹⁵ Kegan Paul, William Godwin, ii, p. 326. Payne had met the Godwins in 1825 through Mrs. Shelley, for whom he cherished a deep, but apparently unrequited affection. See The Romance of Mary W. Shelley, John Howard Payne, and Washington Irving. The Bibliophile Society, Boston, 1907.

¹⁶ Letter xli in vol. v of Letters.

¹⁷ The Complete Poetical Works of Joanna Baillie, First American Edition, Philadelphia, 1832. The anonymous author of the satire, St. Godwin (London, 1800) accuses (p. 177) Godwin of having taken the character of Bethlem Gabor from De Montfort.

¹⁸ Introductory Discourse.

¹⁹ Remarks on Mandeville and Mr. Godwin in vol. iii of Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Harry Buxton Forman, 4 vols., London, 1880. See also Letter 274 in Letters of Shelley, edited by Roger Ingpen, 2 vols., London, 1909.

²⁰ Works, 16 vols., Edinburgh, 1862-71, vol. xi, Notes on Gilfillan's Literary Portraits.

²¹ Marie Joseph de Chénier, Tableau Historique de l'État et des Progrès de la Littérature Française depuis 1789, Paris, 1816, p. 227.

²² With reference to Benjamin Constant, Crabb Robinson says (Diary, Reminiscences, Correspondence, Boston, 1870, I, 117) : “A novel of his, Adolph, was said to favor free opinions on marriage. I had heard that he had translated Godwin's Political Justice, and inquired whether he had really done so. He said he had made the translation, but declined to publish it, because he thought it might injure the good cause in the then state of public feeling. Sooner or later, however, the work was to be published, for he regarded the original as one of the masterpieces of the age.”

In the course of twenty years Constant came to feel that it would be unwise to publish his translation because the sophistries of Political Justice would discredit its truths. For his searching analysis, see his Mélanges de Littérature et de Politique, Paris, 1829.

²³ Fragments d'un Journal Intime, Geneva, I, pp. 179 ff. Interesting for purposes of comparison is Madame Riccoboni's distaste for the speedy redemptions, the “get-good-quick” conversions in The Vicar of Wakefield. To Garrick she wrote: “Pleading in favour of robbers, thieves and people of bad morals was very far from pleasing me.—Your vicar preaches to scoundrels and converts them: I should not like to meet his congregation in a wood, if I had a thousand guineas in my pocket.” See Frank A. Hedgcock, David Garrick and his French Friends, London, p. 361.

²⁴ Essai sur la vie, le caractère et le génie de Lord Byron, Paris, 1830, p. 79.

²⁵ For the details of this illuminating episode of the revolution see Henri Welschinger, Le Théâtre de la Révolution, Paris, 1880, pp. 380 ff.

²⁶ Godwin was bitter against Colman because in spite of his indebtedness to Caleb Williams, he never sent the author either a box or order for admission on the occasion of the production for The Iron Chest.—Recollections of the Table-Talks of Samuel Rogers, London, 1856, ii, p. 250. Godwin suffered even worse injustice from the novelist, George Walker. The latter, after having pillaged Caleb Williams for the plot of his novel, Theodore Cyphon (1796), proceeded in The Vagabond (1799) to burlesque unmercifully the doctrines of Political Justice.

²⁷ Le Théâtre de la Révolution, p. 124.

²⁸ A clerical gentleman, one of Anna Seward's literary correspondents, proposed to write a sequal to Caleb Williams in which Falkland, as an act of atonement, makes Caleb his heir, to the utter ruin of that virtuous youth who enters upon a life of debauchery, and becomes the oppressor of his fellows.—Letters, i, Letter xi.

Byron profited by his reading of Caleb Williams; in one of his quarrels with Lady Byron he threatened to persecute her even as Falkland had persecuted Caleb. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lady Byron Vindicated, Boston, 1870, p. 243.