answered by anticipation the principal matters of the epistle, before opening it on the 6th. The undated expostulatory letter, which thus travelled from London to Lynmouth, _viâ_ Chepstow, and came to Shelley’s hands at Lynmouth on the 6th July, cannot have left London later than the 2nd instant. It is more probable that Godwin wrote the epistle on one of the concluding days of June, than on the 1st or 2nd of July. Yet Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy and other gentlemen, claiming as Shelleyan specialists a peculiar right to dogmatize on Shelleyan questions, insist that this particular epistle, which _cannot_ have been posted later than the 2nd of July, would never have been written by Godwin, had not his vanity been acutely piqued by the passage of the letter, dated to him by Shelley on the 5th of July, in which he spoke with extravagant eulogy of the Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress, as a Deist and Republican, who openly instructed her little pupils in her religious and political views, and seemed to have formed her mind by the precepts of _Political Justice_, before it was her good fortune to peruse the pages of that immortal work. Shelley was urgent in the same letter that Fanny Imlay, _alias_ Wollstonecraft, _alias_ Godwin, might be allowed to journey from London to Devonshire in Miss Hitchener’s company, and stay with him and Harriett at Lynton till the autumn, when they would bring her back to Skinner Street. As Godwin had not educated the young lady, or any of the girls of his curiously composed family, in religious Free Thought, it is not surprising that Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter was not allowed to travel from London to Lynmouth in the company of the Deistical schoolmistress, who joined the trio in North Devon some time about the middle of July. Though there is no conclusive evidence to the point, it has been no less reasonably than generally assumed, that this exemplary young schoolmistress brought with her to the Lynton cottage the large box of inflammatory literature, that had been opened at Holyhead, under circumstances and with consequences already set forth. Anyhow, it is certain that soon after her arrival at Lynton, Shelley had in his keeping at Lynton many copies of the printed compositions that were found in the big box by the Holyhead officials.