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, son of the preceding, was born at Havington in Northamptonshire, 1561; and, after a good foundation of grammar-learning, was sent to Christ Church college, Oxford, where he was elected a student in 1678, while his father was dean. He proceeded B. A. in 1580, and M. A. in 1583; about which time he wrote an entertaining piece upon a philosophical subject, where imagination, judgment, and knowledge, keep an equal pace; but this, as it contradicted certain received notions of his times, he never published. It came out about five years after his death, under the title of “The Man in the Moon; or, a discourse of a voyage thither;” by Domingo Gonsales, 1638, 8vo. It has been several times printed, and shews that he had a creative genius. Domingo Gonsales, a little Spaniard, is supposed to be shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, where he taught several ganzas, or wild geese, to fly with a light machine, and to fetch and carry things for his conveniency. He, after some time, ventured to put himself into the machine, and they carried him with great ease. He happened to be in this aerial chariot at the time of the year when these ganzas, which were birds of passage, took their flight to the moon, and was directly carried to that planet. He has given a very ingenious description of what occurred to him on his way, and the wonderful things which he saw there. Dr. Swift seems to have borrowed several hints from this novel, in his Voyage to Laputa; but it is more to Dr. Godwin’s praise that he appears to have been well acquainted with the Copernican system. He suppressed also another of his inventions at that time, which he called “Nuncius inanimatus,” or the “Inanimate Messenger.” The design was to communicate various methods of conveying intelligence secretly, speedily, and safely; but although he asserts that by an agreement settled between two parties, a message may be conveyed from the one to the other, at the distance of many miles, with an incredible swiftness, yet he does not reveal the secret. It appears, however, to have given rise to bishop Wilkins’s “Mercury, or secret and swift Messenger.” It is said that he afterwards communicated the secret to his majesty, but why it was not acted upon is not mentioned by his biographers. The pamphlet was published in 1629, and afterwards, in 1657, was translated by the learned Dr. Thomas Smith, and published with “The Man in the Moon.”