In his _Leaf from the Real Life of Lord Byron_, the rash and deplorable article on matters about which he knew nothing, Mr. Froude asserted that Mary Godwin was, in her childhood, ‘bred up to regard love as the essential part of marriage;’ these words being used in a sense which caused the essayist to assert that, notwithstanding this breeding-up, she was ‘a perfectly pure innocent woman.’ This assertion that in her childhood Mary was indoctrinated in the anti-matrimonial views her father had abandoned, is absolutely the reverse of fact. Godwin’s children and step-children were educated much like other English children of their social degree; just as they would have been educated had he, instead of being a Deist, been a lukewarm member of the Church of England. Sent to a Church of England school, Charles Clairmont was in no way introduced to Free Thought till he had entered his seventeenth year, and had it not been for T. Turner’s busybodyism, the young man’s introduction to Free Thought would have been deferred till he was much older. Instructed by professional governesses and men-teachers, Mary Godwin and Claire were taught chiefly out of the books produced by their parents in the way of their business, for use in Church-of-England and other Denominational Schools. Their minds were not led prematurely to think about marriage. No eccentric notions touching the intercourse of the sexes had been put into Mary’s mind, when Shelley made her acquaintance. It may be assumed confidently, from the way in which she was educated, that she had never known anything of her mother’s painful history and peculiar views, till Shelley spoke to her about them, and used them as arguments for inducing her to become his mistress. It is certain from her own written words that, instead of regarding marriage as an idle form, she regarded it as a sacred and momentous ceremony. As Godwin was so urgent that she should not be allowed to look into ‘Charles’s book,’ and thought sixteen years a ‘much too early’ age for Charles’s introduction to Free Thought, we may be sure he thought the age _very_ much too early for a clever girl’s initiation in the views of Free-thinkers.