462) to the unpopularity of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and Condorcet: "to aim at perfection has been pronounced to be utter folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery and the inexorable laws of population were a godsend to rescue the state from "the precipice of perfectibility." We can understand the alarm occasioned to believers in the established constitution of things, for Godwin's work--now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed to as a discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on impressionable minds at the time.

All who prized liberty, sympathised with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist.

"No one," said a contemporary, "was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." Young graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional studies to dream of "the renovation of society and the march of mind." Godwin carried with him "all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time." [Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age: article on Godwin (written in 1814).] The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and afterwards Shelley.

Wordsworth had been an ardent sympathiser with the French Revolution.

In its early days he had visited Paris: An emporium then Of golden expectations and receiving Freights every day from a new world of hope.
He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith in Revolutionary France.