heard me make even the slightest insinuation against my wife, or ever cast the most remote reflection upon her character or conduct; neither has it ever come to the knowledge of myself or any of my friends that my wife has spoken one disrespectful word against me. As we have both always lamented, as a misfortune, the circumstances which led to our separation, so we both have carefully abstained from heightening and adding to the poignancy of that misfortune, by mutual accusations, revilings, and recriminations, which would have been as base as they would have been proved to he unfounded. If, on the contrary, I had deserted my wife, after having, when I was first married, surrounded her by prostitutes and courtezans; if I had been intriguing with every loose and abandoned female that came within the precincts of a profligate circle; if, after having driven her from my home, friendless and unprovided for; if, after having personally insulted her, I had hired spies and informers to traduce her character; if I had employed and paid the most abandoned characters, and had suborned them to swear away her life and her honour; if, when this plot had been detected and exposed, and her innocence had been proved by the very means that I had employed to blast her reputation and to destroy her; if I had still, in the most unfeeling and unnatural manner, separated her from, and cut off all communication with, her child, under the hollow and false pretence that she was not a proper person to be entrusted with the care of her own daughter; if, I say, I had driven her out of the country, and, having done this, if I had hired another gang of base villains, not only to dog and watch her steps, but to seduce and bribe her servants to betray her; if I had rewarded these villains, _even with my own money_, to fabricate and propagate all sorts of calumnies against her abroad, while their infamous agents at home were reiterating and magnifying those falsehoods; if I had bribed the dastardly hireling press to libel and villify her; if in fact, I had carried my persecutions and deadly hatred so far as at last _to break the heart of her daughter_; if, upon her return, I had made another atrocious attempt to destroy her by means of hired, bribed and suborned foreign witnesses; if I had done these things, or any of them, I should have been an execrable and detestable villain, and I should have merited the scorn of every man and woman in the universe: but, even then, even if I had been guilty of all these horrible and unnatural deeds, it would, even under these abhorrent circumstances, have been base in the extreme in the doubled-faced, black-hearted villains of the _Courier_, the _dull Post_ and the _mock Times_ to attack me in the way they have repeatedly done about my wife; because there are not three _such abandoned profligate unprincipled_ monsters under the canopy of heaven. Even the _virtuous_ Mr. Perry, of the Morning Chronicle, has, when an occasion offered,