For many years of my life I did nothing but think.-- WILLIAM HAZLITT.

AT fifteen Godwin began a short scholastic career as usher under
Mr. Akers in the school at Hindolveston. There literature seemed
more important than theology; he read all of Shakespeare and
planned an epic poem. His father died in 1772, at the age of fifty
years--" quitting this sublunary scene," Godwin wrote, "with
considerable reluctance"--and Mrs. Anna Godwin was left with a
small amount of property that probably had been her own. It was
decided that a part of the family's income should be devoted to
Godwin's education. He gave up his post of usher and in April
1773 went to London, where he applied for admission to Homerton
Academy, the oldest of several Dissenting colleges. After a severe
examination he was rejected for the heresy of Sandemanianism.
He spent the summer in Kent with relatives, constructing "a
harmony of the Evangelists from the gospels themselves, without
the assistance of any of the commentators," planning two tragedies,
"one on the subject of Iphigenia in Aulis, and the other of the death
of Cæsar," and "reading the works of Sandeman." In December
he was admitted, although his opinions had not changed, to the
Dissenters' college at Hoxton near London.

He stayed at Hoxton five years, "reading," he says, "all the
authors of greatest repute, for and against the Trinity, original
sin and the most disputed doctrines," greedy for knowledge and
scholastic distinction. It was a small college with perhaps thirty
students and three tutors, the ordinary course of instruction in-
cluding "the classics, Hebrew, logic, ethics, divinity, rhetoric, the
mathematics, natural philosophy and pneumatology." The course
was probably inclusive enough--Hazlitt, who went to a similar
college, complained that he studied too many things and learned
too few--but Godwin added for his own benefit English literature.
He worked tirelessly and systematically. ". . . For one whole summer
I rose at five and went to bed at midnight, that I might have suffi-
cient time for theology and metaphysics." He was deeply impressed
with "the maxim that art is long, and life is short," and decided to
read thoroughly rather than widely. "I resolved to read the classics;

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