Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/140

 Nobody, I suppose, ever made so clean a sweep of all existing social ties, but he always preserves the calm and benevolent tone of a preacher drawing obvious morals from the Sermon on the Mount, though the Christian creed is among the doctrines too absurd to require explicit confutation.

The book thus crammed with intellectual explosives appeared in 1793, when the respectable classes were in the panic caused by the French Revolution and the Government preparing the severest measures of suppression. Godwin's friends, Home Tooke and Holcroft, were about to be tried for high treason; and Godwin expected that he might himself be the next victim. It is only just to say that he appears to have rather courted martyrdom by openly showing his sympathies. The acquittal of his friends put an end to the danger; and his own circle rather regretted, it would seem, that he had not had a chance of sharing their glory. Pitt, they reported by way of apology, had said in the Cabinet that a three-guinea book could not do much harm in the class which was dangerous precisely for want of guineas. The fact that so dear a book should have had an immediate circulation of over four