It is in the highest degree improbable that, till Shelley spoke to her of her mother’s views and story, using them as arguments why she should not shrink from becoming his mistress, Mary Godwin had ever heard aught of Mary Wollstonecraft’s dangerous opinions and discreditable career. William Godwin’s daughter was only a few days old when her mother died. Only three years and four months Mary’s senior, Fanny Imlay was too young at her mother’s death to have, in later time, any recollections to impart to Mary about their common parent. Who was at all likely to be at pains to acquaint Mary in her early childhood with her mother’s story? It is not usual for a man, after taking a second wife and having issue by her, to be loquacious about his first wife to her children in their tender age. The cold, unsentimental, unemotional Godwin was not likely to talk of Mary Wollstonecraft to either of her children. Is it conceivable that whilst they were of tender age, or in later years, when they had become inquisitive girls, he revealed to them the particulars of their mother’s story,--told Fanny that she was of shameful birth; told Mary that her sister was a bastard; unfolded to their inquiring minds the doctrines of Free Contract; informed them that their mother held opinions about marriage which he had himself abandoned as dangerous and pernicious; instructed them out of pious regard to her memory that they should on coming to womanly age think of the matrimonial rite as an idle form? Is it imaginable that the second Mrs. Godwin, intent on holding her curiously constituted family within the lines of conventional respectability, enlightened Fanny, and Claire, and Mary, on the very matters she was especially desirous of keeping from their knowledge?