The town has been talking of three libel cases this
week. In the first, Mr. Cornwallis West, Lord-Lieutenant of Denbigh- shire, prosecutes the publisher of Town Talk, one of the journals of debasing gossip which have recently sprung up, for asserting that Mrs. West made a trade of being photographed and selling her photograph ; in the second, Mr. Langtry pro- secutes the same publisher for declaring that he had filed. an action of divorce against his wife, for adultery with the Prince of Wales and other co-respondents ; and in the third, Mr. E. Levi-Lawson, the editor of the Telegraph, in- dicts Mr. Labouchere, editor of Truth, for libel contained in a letter forwarded to him, and then published in the journal. The libel in this case is of the old kind, savage abuse worthy of Billingsgate, rather than definite slander. In the first two cases, the defendant has been committed for trial, and the time for comment on any of them has not yet arrived. This kind of scene is the natural end of an outbreak of " society papers." The dose of gossip soon fails of its effect, and must be made stronger and stronger ; thou journals appear without even a pre- tence of literature ; and then the police and the Courts are called in to end an unendurable nuisance. The evil has cropped up half-a-dozen times since 1800, and the end has always been the same.
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