THE ERASER SCANDAL 315 



that every man in an unscathed coat and trousers, who had no 

 visible means of earning a livelihood, was deemed to come within 

 the rule, and to be entitled to what was still called " satisfaction." 

 I heard of a tailor talking to the gentleman who employed him 

 of personal satisfaction, because his employer cast doubts on the 

 justness of his charge ; but looking very blue when the gentle- 

 man told him he should be delighted to let the settlement of 

 the account be decided by an encounter. So lax had the code 

 of honour become, and so censorious the world as to a man's 

 declining to fight with any one on the score that he was not a 

 gentleman, that although my conduct might, as a second, have 

 been governed by a nicer discrimination, so far as I was con- 

 cerned, and my second admitted it, I resolved to fight, if called 

 on, with the sweeper of a street crossing, if dressed in his 

 Sunday best. The affair in which I was engaged with a Dr. 

 Maginn, since dead, being, at the time, matter of considerable 

 publicity, I take this opportunity of alluding to it, the more so 

 because I have for years seen such erroneous accounts of it given 

 by the press, the last two recently in the Irish Quarterly Review, 

 that if not noticed in its true colours, the wrong account of 

 that meeting will gain an air of truth, the real cause of it and 

 its miserable turpitude be lost, and the whole thing be handed 

 down as a political quarrel got up, even according to the Irish 

 Quarterly, by my opponents " in Mr. Fraser's back parlour, over 

 brandy and water." I do not wish to expose the facts of the 

 case, nor to have to deal with the reputations of the dead ; but 

 if I see any more eulogiums passed on those who did not deserve 

 them, I shall be forced, though most reluctantly, to tell an 

 unvarnished tale, and to expose the full extent to which a public 

 reviewer has it in his power to abuse his public duty. The 

 quarrel arose from no " political feeling," the review on the 

 novel published by me, of Berkeley Castle, and which appeared 

 in Eraser's Magazine, was written not on the work but at me, 

 for reasons of which I have since become fully aware, and it 

 needs but little more to make me tell them. 



If there is to be no personal reference in matters that come 



