To say thus much in the Lord Chancellor’s justification is not to say that his reasonable opinion would have been justified by the event, had Shelley contrived to get possession of the two children, and carrying them beyond the limits of the Chancellor’s jurisdiction, educated them in accordance with his notions of parental duty. On the contrary, I have little doubt that, had he taken them to Italy together with Willie and Clara, and lived long enough to form their morals, he would not have educated them in his anti-matrimonial views, but would have trained them for the most part like the majority of English boys and girls, living abroad under the control of liberal-minded Christian parents. I have two reasons for this opinion. Unless I am greatly mistaken, had he lived well into life’s middle term, long before the children had attained the age at which he would have thought of directing their young minds to questions touching the intercourse of the sexes, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ would have so far survived his enthusiasm for the Free Contract and his wilder Free Love phantasies, as to have no wish to see his children avoid the bonds of lawful marriage. Had it been otherwise with him, I am confident that Mrs. Shelley would have resisted strenuously and successfully his wish to educate his children to prefer the Free Contract to lawful wedlock. Of the girls, whom he tried for any considerable period to illuminate out of Christianity and conventional respectability, his strong-willed second wife was perhaps his least submissive pupil. The young woman, who made him marry her on the earliest opportunity; who at Great Marlow used to order him about as though he were a child; who had her children christened before taking them out of England in 1818; who used to attend the services of the Anglican Church in Italian cities; who during her residence in Italy hungered for social recognition; and who in her later time was no less mindful of social opinion than for ‘a brief hour of her girlhood she had been reckless and defiant of it,’ was not the woman to allow her children to be educated in disregard for the sanctity of the matrimonial rite. Nurtured within the lines of orthodoxy, and educated for respectability by the step-mother, of whom she lived to speak and write ungenerously, Shelley’s second wife was not a woman to let him train her own daughters (had they lived), or Harriett’s little Ianthe, to follow in the steps of Mary Wollstonecraft.