I827.J Letter on Affairs in yeneral. 40^ 



were called as witnesses, who declared that they lived near the premises, 

 and never found any unpleasant smell at all. This flat contradiction at 

 first astonished every body ; but, upon inquiry, it turned out that these 

 witnesses were all nightmen ! Now, to have questioned the accuracy of 

 the olfactory nerves of these people, could hardly have been drawn into 

 a sin ! In the case before us, there is the double offence, by the party who 

 calls himself libelled the man is a pagan, and not content witii being a 

 pagan a lock-up house-keeper to boot. This simony, as it were, in sin 

 this monopol of abominable quality is material because I heard the 



says 



constable " why, he's a Jew ! " " Veil," returned the man of cast 

 apparel " and your mash tor's own friend Baron Rothschild, vat you 

 bow to every day ishn't he a Jew ?" " Yes," replied the other " but 

 he doesn't keep an old-clothes-shop." The Israelite was silenced. So, / 

 think, that there are callings in life I alluded in one of my late letters 

 to the cases of the hangman and the common informer in which the 

 less we say (unless in very extreme emergencies) about " character," the 

 better ; and the doctrine that every written statement, given so as to be seen 

 by third persons, if it go to injure, or bring a particular man into ridicule, 

 shall be a libel this doctrine, joined to the law, that, in a proceeding by 

 indictment for such libel, the truth of the statement cannot be given in 

 justification in how many absurd and ridiculous positions, it might place 

 us ! For instance looking at the possible case of a man like the present 

 prosecutor the J ew bailiff. Suppose a debtor, confined in a lock-up house ; 

 and robbed, as persons in such places commonly are; only to copy out in 

 chalk upon the wall of his room, the bill of charges brought him from day 

 to day by the landlord. There can be very little doubt that this would be 

 a writing calculated to do more than ridicule to injure the bailiff: that 

 fact would give it the quality of a libel. It would be open to be seen by 

 third persons ; i. e. by future prisoners shut up in the same room : this 

 would amount to " publication," and complete the offence ! It might, 

 perhaps, be attempted to be argued, for a defendant that, the libel being 

 written upon the interior walls of the plaintiffs house, the keeper suffered 

 no injury ; because, though it would be read by future prisoners, yet it 

 could only be seen by them, after they were already in his power. But, 

 this plea would not do ; because it would be replied, and truly, that the 

 bailiff might still suffer damage ; inasmuch as that prisoners (seeing this 

 writing) might remove themselves, at once, to the prisons of the King's 

 Bench, or the Fleet, who would otherwise have remained in his lock-up 

 house. And the serious fact is, that a defendant, indicted under these 

 circumstances, must, as the law stands, be convicted ; for, although he 

 should have the very bill, in the plaintiff's own hand-writing, from which 

 he had copied the libel, in his pocket, he could not in a case of prosecu- 

 tion produce it in his defence. Now this case, extreme as it appears, is not 

 quite hypothetical. A dispute, pretty nearly similar, did arise ; and a 

 proceeding at law was Contemplated in which the defendant certainly 

 would have been worsted. But the cause never came to issue ; for a scul- 

 lion wench of the lock-up house, either influenced by some unusual fit of 

 cleanliness, or bribed by the defendant's attorney, walked up stairs ona 

 M.M. New Series VOL. III. No. 16. 3 G 



