When he wrote that, though Mary Godwin ‘had been bred up to regard love as the essential part of marriage, she was a perfectly pure and innocent woman,’ (meaning, of course, that she was trained in childhood to hold certain of her parents’ earlier and notorious views respecting marriage, _i.e._ that love was a sufficient sanction of conjugal union, and that where such love existed it was better for spouses to live together in Free Love than in the bondage of Lawful Wedlock), Mr. Froude only showed his absolute ignorance of the matters on which he wrote so rashly, under the insufficient instructions of the person or persons who should have instructed him better. It is certain that, during their brief association, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft modified those views of marriage so far as to be lawfully married to one another; that soon after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, if not during her life, Godwin abandoned them altogether; and that his daughter by her was _not_ educated to regard the matrimonial rite as an idle form. In a former chapter of this work evidence has been given, under Godwin’s own hand, that Mary Wollstonecraft’s children were _not_ educated in accordance with their mother’s peculiar views; that he deemed so clever a boy as Charles Clairmont was in his seventeenth year far too young for initiation in Free Thought; that on sending the boy Anthony Collins’s sober and moderate book, he was urgent that Mary should not be allowed to see a line of it. Never touched with Free Contract sentiment, the second Mrs. Godwin held the Free Contract people in aversion, and their doctrines in contemptuous detestation. Had it been otherwise, she would have been spoken of less harshly by some of her husband’s friends.