LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
POSITIVISTS AND MARRIAGE.
sro THE EDITOR or THE I' SPRETTOR.1 SIR —The reviewer of the "Life of Mortimer Collins" it your last issue has been permitted to cite, as " really admirable," four stanzas, one of which begins,— " Husbands and wives should be all one community,"
and it ends,— " Such is the creed of the Positivists."
In a case of this kind, it is best to use plain words, without com- ment. I will only say that the statement your reviewer quotes is a malignant falsehood, as you are well aware.—I am, Sir, 8se., Fnenfatic Hanefsors [Yes, we are aware, as we are also aware that " Hudibras " contains travesties, or sometimes entire misrepresentations of Puritanism. That would not prevent any critic from pronounc- ing bits of " Hutlibras" "admirable," not as statements of fact, but as humouristic rhymes. In this instance, Mr. Harrison, in losing his temper, seems also to have lost his sense of literary afoot, Mr. Mortimer Collins was not thinking of the arrogant coterie which calls itself the Positivist Church, and which thinks any persecution better than a joke, but of the body of Materialists at home and abroad who Were just then raising a war-whoop over the Darwinian hypothesis. What had Comte to do with the monkey pedigree of man'? Collins was unjust even to
the Materialists, but a Catholic might just as well charge Barham with falsehood because of the "Jackdaw of Rheims," or a China- man malign Charles Lamb because of his essay on roast-pig.— Spectator.] ED.
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