Four Early Pamphlets

William Godwin wrote Four Early Pamphlets. The list under the title names four pieces: A Defense of the Rockingham Party, in Their Late Coalition with the Right Honorable Frederic Lord North, Instructions to a Statesman, An Account of the Seminary and The Herald of Literature. Under the heading A Defence of the Rockingham Party, the text says the present reign will certainly appear to our posterity full of the noblest materials for history.

The text calls aristocracy a kind of government which, carried to its height, is perhaps, of all the different species of despotism, the most intolerable. The text says the ancients are full of a noble and affecting simplicity, and that the pathos of Virgil and the sublimity of Homer have never been surpassed. Under the heading Article VIII, The Alchymist, a Comedy, Altered from Ben Jonson, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Esq., the text says there are few characters that have risen into higher favour with the English nation than Mr. Sheridan.