How are this statement and the superabundant evidence of its accuracy dealt with by one of the several gentlemen who, not content with white-washing and painting Shelley into a respectable member of a respectable county family, and white-washing Mary Godwin into a suitable wife for so respectable a member of so respectable a county family, must needs whitewash Shelley’s second mother-in-law into a suitable mother for so suitable a wife for so respectable a member of so highly respectable a county family? In his _Life of William Godwin_, Mr. Kegan Paul ventures to say that ‘Mr. Knowles is so extremely inaccurate in regard to all else that he says of her, that his testimony,’ respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s intimacy with Fuseli, ‘may be wholly set aside.’ This astounding statement is made by a gentleman who does not give a single fact in support of the baseless charge of inaccuracy. It is directly the reverse of fact that Mr. Knowles is extremely inaccurate in what he says about Mary Wollstonecraft. In the memoir of Mary, forming the preface of his edition of her _Letters to Imlay_, Mr. Kegan Paul calls Knowles’s careful and accurate statement a ‘preposterous story,’ _i.e._ a story contrary to nature and reason; a wrong, foolish, monstrous, absurd story. Fortunately Mr. Kegan Paul gives his reasons for thus stigmatizing a truthful story and conscientious writer. (1) Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘I have failed to find any confirmation whatever of this preposterous story.’ (2) He says, ‘I find much which makes directly against it, the strongest fact being that Mary remained to the end the correspondent and close friend of Mrs. Fuseli.’ What reasons for declaring the story ‘preposterous’! It is proved completely, proved (as the phrase goes) up to the very hilt; but it must be false because Mr. Kegan Paul has failed to discover any additional confirmatory evidence of its truth,--evidence needed by no discreet reader. It must be false, because Mrs. Fuseli corresponded with Mary to the last! This is Mr. Kegan Paul’s _strongest fact, making directly against_ the statement.