 Ford K. Brown writes in his biography of Godwin, "The Life of William Godwin", of a story in which a young boy finds out he just missed the author of Caleb Williams and “with true genuine enthusiasm, falling suddenly on his knees, reverently kissed the chair which the philosopher had just quitted, rapturously thanking heaven that he might now say he had been in company with the author of the best novel in the English, or in any language.” A particularly glorifying review was written in William Hazlitt's essay entitled The Spirit of the Age.The review includes an immensely flattering description of Godwin and his writing of Caleb Williams, “he was in the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity; he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation; no one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off—now he has sunk below the horizon, and enjoyed the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality.” Hazlitt wrote that "no one ever began "Caleb Williams" that did not read it through