"Here, at once, I find myself in a difficulty. When I say that the colours in which Frederick Holdfast is painted are false colours, that the character given to him is a false character, and that the charges brought against him are false charges, it appears as if I myself were bringing an accusation against Mrs. Lydia Holdfast, a lady with whom I have not the pleasure of being acquainted. I prefer not to do this. I prefer to bring the accusation against your Reporter, who must have allowed his zeal and enthusiasm to play tricks with his judgment when he sat down to describe, in his captivating manner, certain statements made to him by a lady in distress. He was writing a romance--there was a villain in it (a necessity); necessary, therefore, that this villain should be painted in the blackest colours, to rival other villains in the Penny Awfuls which obtain so strong a hold over young people among our poorer classes. The parallel is not a fair one. The villains in the Penny Awfuls are imaginary creatures; they live only in the brains of the cheap novelist; to vilify them, to defame them, can hurt the feelings, can do injury, to no living being. But the villain your Reporter has depicted in his Romance of Real Life is a man who lived, who was honoured, and who had at least one firm and true friend in the person of him who is now tracing these lines. To defame and vilify the dead is an act of the grossest injustice, and of this injustice your Reporter is guilty. "I was at Oxford with Frederick Holdfast, and shared in his pleasures and his studies. We were cronies. We had few secrets from each other, and our close intimacy enabled me not only to gain an insight into Frederick's character, but to form a just estimate of it. And I solemnly declare that my dead friend was as guiltless of the charges brought against him by Mrs. Holdfast and your Reporter in his Oxford career as I believe him to be incapable of the baseness imputed to him in his father's house in London. Of the latter I can speak only from presumption. Of the former I can speak with certainty, but my conviction in the one case is as strong as it is in the other. "It is a monstrous falsehood to describe Frederick Holdfast's 'career of dissipation' as being 'capped by degraded association with degraded women.' His estimate of woman was high and lofty; he was almost quixotic in the opinion he entertained of her purity, and even when he felt himself compelled to condemn, there was invariably apparent in his condemnation a touch of beautiful pity it was an experience to meet with in this shrug-shoulder age, in which cynicism and light words upon noble themes have become the fashion. That he was free from faults I do not assert, but his errors had in them nothing of that low kind of vice which your Reporter has so glibly attached to his name.