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
Recollections of the Lake Poets Lakes and the Lake Poets" (1862); that title may or may not have originated with De Quincey. There were three twentieth-century editions of the essays. Edward Sackville-West's "Recollections of the Lake Poets" (1948) and John E. Jordan's "Reminiscences of the English Lake Poets" (1961) both relied primarily upon the 1854 revised texts; for his 1970 edition, David Wright returned to the original magazine texts and to the title of the 1862 collection. Recollections of the Lake Poets Recollections of the Lake Poets is a collection of biographical essays written by the English author Thomas De Quincey. In these essays, originally