On what grounds does Mr. Froude ask us to believe things, so incredible that it is difficult to imagine any evidence that would justify us in believing them? Mr. Froude has nothing whatever _to show_; nothing whatever to urge, in support of his extravagant assertions, except talk about a letter, which he may not show, because Sir Percy Shelley thinks it better not to show it. We are not told when this letter was written, under what circumstances it was written, for what purpose it was written. Mr. Froude says the letter was written by Claire. Any statement told by Claire, to the discredit of their curious views of Shelley and his career, is unhesitatingly rejected as a falsehood by the Shelleyan enthusiasts. They do not falter in charging Claire with falsehood in telling the certain truth, that she was the Constantia of Shelley’s verse. They do not falter in charging her with falsehood, in saying that Fanny Imlay, _alias_ Wollstonecraft _alias_ Godwin, killed herself for love of Shelley. According to the Shelleyan enthusiasts Claire went through life, telling fibs whenever fibs would serve her purpose; and yet a letter, said to have been written by her (a letter withheld from public scrutiny), is enough to satisfy them, that Byron, after causing her (his already _enceinte_ mistress) to come out to him in Switzerland, never saw her there except in the presence of a third party. To believe this is to believe the incredible. When it shall be produced to the world, it will be time enough to give an opinion whether this marvellous letter was written by Claire to screen Mary from her father’s censure; or at a later time to whitewash her sister Mary in the eyes of Sussex society; or was a fabrication, for which Claire was in no degree accountable. Should it appear that Claire really wrote the letter, it will only be additional evidence of her faculty for fibbing. To support the letter’s manifest untruths, with words written by Mary (who, as we have seen, was often curiously inaccurate in her biographical statements), or with words written by Shelley (who seldom let a month pass without penning something wholly devoid of historic truth about himself or his affairs), would be only to produce evidence of a conspiracy to impose an untruth on human credulity, for some purpose or other.