The Note, headed ‘There is no God,’ opens with a reproduction of the tract which caused the author’s extrusion from Oxford,--a reproduction differing from the original essay only in occasional amendments of the language, made for the sake of greater precision and elegance; such alterations in fact as are looked for in a new edition of a work by an author, who holds steadily to the principles and argumentative details of the original composition. Can stronger evidence be required that the tract was a serious and genuine declaration of the writer’s views in 1811, and that in the spring of 1813 he held the same views about _The Necessity of Atheism_ as he held in the spring of the earlier year? The Note, headed ‘Even love is sold,’ contains the following passages of especial interest:-- ‘Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern _the indisciplinable wanderings of passion_, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the _involuntary affections_ of our nature. _Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness...._ ‘_How long then ought the sexual connection to last?_ What law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? _A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered, which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object...._