There is another piece of remarkable evidence, respecting the education Godwin gave his children, to be found amongst the excellent materials of Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders. Four days after the boy’s withdrawal from the Charterhouse School, Godwin sent his step-son Charles a book, instead of another work the lad had been advised to read. On sending the book to Ramsgate, where Charles was staying with his mother, Godwin, on 24th May, 1811, wrote to Mrs. Godwin in these words:-- ‘I send Charles’s book agreeably to his desire.... The very choice of the book is taken out of my hands; T. T. undertook to procure for him Paine’s _Age of Reason_; this I objected to. It is written in a vein of banter and impudence, and though I do not wish the young man to be the slave of the religion of his country, there are few things I hate more than a young man, with his little bit of knowledge, setting-up to turn up his nose, and elevate his eyebrows, and make his sorry joke at everything the wisest and best men England ever produced, have treated with veneration. Therefore I preferred a work by Anthony Collins, the friend of Locke, written with sobriety and learning, to the broad grins of Thomas Paine.... Observe, I totally object to Mary’s reading in Charles’s book. I think it much too early for him, but I have been driven, so far as he is concerned, from the standing of my own judgment by the improper conduct of T. T.’ It is instructive to observe how William Godwin fell away from his philosophical theories as soon as he was required to put them in practice. It is one thing for a scholar to theorize in his arm-chair for the guidance of individuals, who are unknown to him; another thing for him to act on his precepts, in the education of persons to whom he is drawn by parental affection. In theory an enemy to marriage, when Mary Wollstonecraft gave him her wounded heart, he had lived with her in Free Love for only a few months, when he discovered that he had better marry her. From the day of his marriage he moved further away from his old hostility to wedlock, till he altogether abandoned his former views against marriage, and became a supporter of the institution he had so long derided. A theorist on education, he no sooner had little girls to care for at his own hearth, than he discovered his ‘incompetence for the education of daughters,’ and bethought himself that he had better find a second wife, who would bring them up in the old-fashioned way. A bold Deist whilst he was a bachelor, he became a timid Deist in private life on becoming a father. When Charles Clairmont came to reasonable years, Godwin shrunk from the thought of giving him the _Age of Reason_ and would fain have postponed his introduction to Free Thought. On putting Anthony Collins’ moderate book in the hands of the sixteen-years-old boy, he was urgent that his daughter (in her fourteenth year) should not be allowed to