When anyone is about to become an object of popular, _i. e._, newspaper censure, I have been taught to see how the scavenger-beetles of the Press contrive to pick up an infinitesimal grain of fact, like the African mud-rolling beetle, until it becomes so monstrously exaggerated that it is absolutely a mass of filth. The pity of it is that most of the writers forget for whom they write. We are not all club-loungers, or drawing-room gossips; nor are we all infected with the prevailing madness of believing everything we see in the newspapers. We do not all belong to that large herd of unthinking souls who say, ‘Surely, where there is so much smoke, there must be a fire’; those stupid souls who never knew that, as likely as not, the fire was harmless enough, and that the alarming cloud of smoke was owing to the reporter’s briarwood! Therefore I say, the instant I perceive, whether in the Press, or in Society, a charge levelled at some person, countryman, or foreigner, I put on the brake of reason, to prevent my being swept along by the general rage for scandal and abuse, and hold myself unconscious of the charge until it is justified by conviction. All the actions of my life, and I may say all my thoughts, since 1872, have been strongly coloured by the storm of abuse and the wholly unjustifiable reports circulated about me then. So numerous were my enemies, that my friends became dumb, and I had to resort to silence, as a protection against outrage. It is the one good extracted from my persecution that, ever since, I have been able to restrain myself from undertaking to pass sentence on another whom I do not know. No man who addresses himself to me is permitted to launch judgment out in that rash, impetuous newspaper way, without being made to reflect that he knew less about the matter than he had assumed he did. This change in me was not immediate. The vice of reckless, unthinking utterance was not to be suddenly extirpated. Often, as I opened my mouth in obedience to the impulse, I was arrested by the self-accusation, ‘Ah! there you go, silly and uncharitable as ever!’ It was slow unlearning, but the old habit was at last supplanted by the new. * * * * * Stanley bore himself in the spirit of the words which F. W. H. Myers[17] applies to Wordsworth:-- ‘He who thus is arrogantly censured should remember both the dignity and the frailty of man, ... and go on his way with no bitter broodings, but yet ... “with a melancholy in the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from thought to thought, a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve.”’