VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, which was afterwards translated into English by his son Morgan Godwin. His last work was a treatise on "The Roman Sesterce and the Attic Talent." He died in 1633.—P. L.
* GODWIN, George, F.R.S., was born at Brompton, January 28, 1815. The son of an architect, and trained in the office of his father, Mr. Godwin has followed that profession; constructed several buildings, and conducted many architectural restorations, the most important being that of Redcliffe church, Bristol; but he is probably best known to the general public as the editor of the Builder; which he has conducted since 1844. In that work, which mainly owes to him its present influential position, he has been the originator of many, and the zealous supporter of all of the efforts, which have been made for improving the dwellings of the labouring classes, and for sanitary reforms generally. Mr. Godwin has also contributed largely to other journals, both popular and professional; written a farce; a series of tales; a popular sketch of architectural styles; and was joint author, with Mr. Britton, of the Description of the Churches of London, 2 vols. 8vo, 1838. He was elected F.S.A. in 1839, and F.R.S. in 1840. He is also a fellow of the Institute of British Architects, in the proceedings of which he takes an active part; is one of the surveyors under the metropolitan buildings act; and honorary secretary of the Art-Union of London.—J. T—e.
GODWIN, Mary, the English George Sand, better known by her maiden name of Mary Wollstonecraft, was born probably at Epping, near London, on the 27th of April, 1759. Her parents belonged to the lower stratum of the middle class, and removed while she was very young to some distance from the metropolis, her father following the vocation of a farmer. When Mary was sixteen, the father returned to the neighbourhood of London to engage in business. He seems to have been a person unskilful in the management alike of his affairs and of his temper. His daughter had a great deal of the sensibility which the writers of her favourite school praised and stimulated; and at an early age already showing the independence which became afterwards a dogma with her, she quitted the paternal roof to shift for herself. She was first companion to a lady in Bath, a situation which probably suited her little, and which she exchanged in her twenty-fifth year for the management of a boarding-school at Islington (afterwards removed to Newington-Green), in conjunction with two of her sisters. Her new duties she appears to have discharged with zeal and success, though the intimacy which she then contracted with the once celebrated Dr. Price was not calculated to tranquillize her excitable mind, or steady its wavering impulses. A dear female friend at Lisbon was dangerously ill under peculiar circumstances; and Mary Wollstonecraft, romantically obeying the call of friendship, left Newington-Green and its school to nurse her. When she returned the school was in anything but a flourishing condition, and nothing loth to escape from the restraint which living with her sisters imposed upon her, she gave it up and became governess in the family of Lord Kingsborough. She remained in this situation not many months. Before entering on it she had received a few guineas from a London bookseller for her earliest work, "Thoughts on the Education of Daughters," and on leaving Lord Kingsborough's family in 1787 she repaired to London to become an authoress by profession, under the auspices of her first publisher. She wrote novels, she reviewed, and she translated, producing among other works a version of Lavater's Physiognomy. During three years of literary drudgery thus spent she was obscure indeed, but she was blameless; nay more, she not only earned an honourable subsistence for herself, but contributed to the support of her father, and to the education of younger brothers. The French revolution first impelled her to a species of authorship which brought her into notoriety. A book of hers was among the many replies provoked by Burke's French Revolution, a work in which her early friend Dr. Price was attacked. It was followed by her more famous "Vindication of the Rights of Woman," of which an echo was lately heard from beyond the Atlantic in Bloomerism and the Woman's Rights' movement of the United States. Mary was now socially lost. She insisted on converting a friendly intimacy with Fuseli into a passionate one, and when the painter, whose wife was her acquaintance, repelled her overtures, she migrated in sorrow to Paris. There she contracted a political intimacy with the leading Girondins, and had the pain of seeing them fall by the guillotine. Still more disastrous was the result of an illicit attachment which united her for a time to the fortunes of a commercial American, a Mr. Imlay. It led her to Norway (a visit which produced her striking work, "Letters from Norway"), and to two attempts at suicide. In 1796 she gained the philosophical heart of the congenial author of the Inquiry into Political Justice—(see Godwin, William)—and their marriage took place six months after the ceremony ought to have been performed, in the April of 1796. She died in childbed on the 10th of September following, and her daughter became afterwards the wife of the poet Shelley. Her husband edited her posthumous works, and his memoir of their author is marked by a startling candour.—F. E.
GODWIN, Thomas, one of Queen Elizabeth's prelates, was born at Ockingham in Berkshire in 1517, and educated at Magdalen college, Oxford, of which he was made fellow in 1544. Dr. Richard Layton, archdeacon of Bucks, was the patron of his early life; and by him he was imbued with an attachment to the principles of the Reformation. Resigning his fellowship for the free school at Brackley in Northamptonshire, he continued there unmolested during the reign of Edward VI. Upon Mary's accession he was obliged to leave the school, and to betake himself for a living to the practice of physic, in which faculty he took a bachelor's degree at Oxford in 1555. When Elizabeth came to the throne he took orders, and found a zealous patron in Bishop Bullingham of Lincoln, who made him his chaplain, and procured him an appointment to preach before the queen. Elizabeth made him one of her Lent-lecturers, and he continued to discharge this duty annually for a period of eighteen years. He was successively promoted to the deaneries of Christ Church, Oxford, and Canterbury; and he held also in succession two prebends in the cathedral of Lincoln. In 1584 he was nominated bishop of Bath and Wells, in which see he continued till his death, November 19, 1590.—P. L.
GODWIN, Thomas, born in Somersetshire in 1587; and educated at Magdalen hall, Oxford, where he took his two degrees in arts in 1606 and 1609. In the latter year he became head master of the free school in Abingdon, where he highly distinguished himself by his skill and success as a teacher. For the use of his school he published his "Romanæ Historiæ Anthologia," printed at Oxford in 1613, and his "Florilegium Phrasicum, or a survey of the Latin tongue." Having entered the church he became chaplain to Montague, bishop of Bath and Wells, and was made rector of Brightwell in Berkshire, when he quitted the fatigues of his school. In 1616 he published his "Synopsis Antiquitatum Hebraicarum." In 1625 appeared his principal work, entitled "Moses and Aaron," which was long valued and used as a manual of the civil and ecclesiastical antiquities of the Hebrews. Carpzov, Hottinger, Van den Honert, and Jennings have all commented upon Godwin. In 1637 he took his degree of D.D., and having published "Three Arguments to prove Election upon Foresight of Faith," he was for some time engaged in controversy with Dr. William Twisse of Newbury. He died in 1663.—P. L.
GODWIN, William, philosopher, novelist, and historian, was born at Wisbeach in Cambridgeshire, on the 3rd of March, 1756. His father was, as his grandfather had been, a dissenting minister, a circumstance which shaped his early education and career. At seventeen Godwin was placed in the dissenting college at Hoxton, with a view to being trained for the ministry, and he remained there five years under Dr. Rees and Dr. Kippis, in spite of whose teaching it is recorded, curiously enough, he adhered steadfastly to a rigid Calvinism. At twenty-two he was admitted a member of the dissenting ministry, and intrusted with the care of a congregation near London, whence he removed shortly afterwards to occupy a similar position at Stowmarket in Suffolk. After four years of the ministry Godwin's views were completely transformed, and he abandoned his first vocation for ever, repairing to London to earn his bread by literature. His earliest work—"Sketches of History," in a series of sermons,—seems to have been a failure. He acquired some reputation, however, as the conductor of the New Annual Register, and formed intimacies with the leading democratic politicians whom the French revolution stimulated into activity, being noticed and patronized by such men as Fox and Sheridan. It was under these circumstances, that at the acme of the French revolution, he published in 1793 his celebrated "Inquiry into Political Justice." In this work the boldest speculations of the age were made the basis of a new social system, in which such institutions as marriage and property were to be unknown. The book
