40 
sailors carried their board-ship manners into society in a way 
which would be thought odd now, though Miss Burney’s sea- 
captain is a perfect master of deportment compared with Smollett’s ; 
and that the dandies of that day wore their own hair, but disguised 
with grease and powder. 
There are but two other novelists whose names I think it 
incumbent on me to mention briefly in connection with the 
Eighteenth Century, “Monk” Lewis and William Godwin. Miss 
Edgeworth and Miss Austin, though born respectively in 1767 
and 1775, did not begin to write until 1800 was past and gone, 
Matthew Gregory Lewis (a young man of means and position, who 
entered Parliament soon after he was of age), wrote at twenty a 
work called the “Monk,” which attracted great attention, and 
procured for him the nickname of “Monk” Lewis, by which he 
has ever since been known. Unfortunately he repeated, and with 
exaggeration, the coarsenesses of Smollett, and that in an age 
which was less tolerant of indecencies. The work which follows 
is long out of print, and is not to be found now in many good 
libraries. The “Bravo of Venice,” another story of his, very 
much after the fashion of Mrs. Radcliffe, was, I think, published 
in the nineteenth century, but will scarcely survive into the 
twentieth. 
William Godwin, whose eighty years were spent in this world 
between-1756 and 1836, is perhaps better known now to the general 
mass of readers as the husband of Mary Wolstencroft, and the 
father of Mary Godwin, the second wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 
and authoress of ‘‘Frankenstein,” than as the author of “Caleb 
Williams,” or as the writer of numerous works on political and 
social topics. Yet “Caleb Williams,” which was published in 
1794, is very ably written, created a great sensation at the time, 
and seemed to have secured for itself what an Irishman once 
happily called a “temporary immortality.” William Hazlitt, the 
greatest critic of that day, spoke of it as “a masterpiece both as to 
invention and execution.” De Quincey, on the other hand, says: 
“Critics of talent have raised ‘Caleb Williams’ to a station in the 
first rank of novels; whilst many more, amongst whom I am 
