The best parts of _St.Leon_ (1799) and _Fleetwood_ (1805) are perhaps better than anything in _Caleb: Mandeville_ (1817) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are _senilia_.[15] The graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in _St.Leon_ is said to be modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of youth and childhood in _Fleetwood_.

But _St.Leon_, besides its historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural dullness and languor of general story: nor has _Fleetwood_ anything like the absorbing power which _Caleb Williams_ exercises, in its own way and on its own people.

Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public attention.

In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama on one side, but the sermon on the other.

Not so very long before these two had almost engrossed the domain of _popular_ literature, the graver and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than (in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it.
With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood by itself.