The Spirit of the Age His masterwork, "An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice", "gave ... a blow to the philosophical mind of the country". To those with a penchant for thinking about the human condition, Godwin was "the very God of our idolatry" who "carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time" and engaged the energy of a horde of "young men of talent, of education, and of principle." These included some of Hazlitt's most famous former friends, the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Twenty-five years later, Hazlitt looks back in astonishment that, in the interval, Godwin's reputation "has sunk below
Lake Poets on the mantle of Wordsworth as the "new Sage of the Lakes, the Picturesque Figure, the Old Man of Coniston." Nicholson saw him as the "Picturesque Figure" "for in him are combined its three main phases - the aesthetic, the scientific and the moral...". His scientific approach to the rocks and water of the Lakes, Nicholson argues, was an attempt, not to understand his subject, but to teach people how to react to it in a "practical and moral" way. Lake Poets The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England,