The Pall Mall of last Monday accuses us of a
great breach of literary etiquette in speculating—erroneously, it seems—on the authorship of the contemptuous attack on our article of a fort- night ago, "The Materialists' Stronghold." We congratulate the Pall Mall on having two such able contributors, though we regret that two writers so strong should hold a creed so narrow and arrogant. But we cannot see the sin of conjecturally attributing a given article, with expressions of sincere intellectual respect, to an author no doubt indicated, though without any mention of his name, who is known to contribute to the paper in which it appears, who is known to agree generally in its tenor, and who has, moreover, never shown much anxiety to keep even his name a secret. If there be any violation of etiquette in that, —which we do not believe,—the etiquette violated by the Pall Mall when it calmly attributes to us both cowardice and dis- honesty, for that is what the following sentences assert, seems to us one much more widely respected and much sounder in principle. Our contemporary says :—" The truth is that the Spectator, in the article we criticised, committed itself to a doctrine which was on the face of it monstrous. On the monstrosity of this doctrine being pointed out, the Spectator had not the courage either to retract its words or to defend them. It has had recourse to denying their plain meaning We know not which of the two is the more to be wondered at, the moral cowardice of a writer who has so utterly deserted his position, or the dialectical daring of his attempt to explain away a statement of which the meaning is unmistakable." That is petulant and silly besides. Everyone who knows this journal knows that we utterly despise the affecta- tion of omniscience, and constantly confess blunders. But we cannot confess blunders which we never made, merely because it is convenient to the Pall Mall to believe that we made them. The context sufficiently proved our meaning, and it is childish as well as rude, to cap, with a charge of dishonesty, an intellectual criticism which could only have been rendered plausible by ignoring the context.
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