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Updated: June 5, 2025
"Let them then punish the flattery by which they are assailed, since they are so much afraid of the libel that always contains some good truths: besides, the public are there to judge the detractor; and no unjust satire ever circulated a fort-night, without being branded with contempt.
Button was in high fettle over the amazingly truthful and unlooked-for articles in the Mail, and as eager to know and reward their author as he had been to apprehend and punish the earlier detractor.
When the critic enters his department of literature in the false guise of urbanity and candor merely to conceal an incapable and huckstering soul, he only awakens for himself the irrevocable contempt of the very mind that he would gall or subdue; since that mind, under such circumstances, invariably rises above its detractor, and leaves him exposed on the same creaking gibbet that he has prepared for the object of his fear or envy."
When Voltaire paid his famous last visit to the capital , some one thought of paying court to Rousseau by making a mock of the triumphal reception of the old warrior, but Rousseau harshly checked the detractor.
It was not he, but his father, who had given the offence which drove Bahram into rebellion, and almost forced him to vindicate his manhood by challenging his detractor to a trial of strength. Bahram could have no personal ground of quarrel with him.
It is possible that he now and then misapplied his pen to abuse his own enemies or those of his friends, for we know that the honourable Mucius Scaevola was violently attacked by him; and there is a story that being once lampooned in the theatre in a libellous manner, the poet sued his detractor, but failed in obtaining damages, on the ground that he himself had done the same to others.
Happily we are able to tell just what Brown himself thought of his detractor, and of the paper that he conducted; for in July, 1858, writing to F.G. Sanborn, he says: "I believe all honest, sensible Free State men in Kansas consider George Washington Brown's Herald of Freedom one of the most mischievous, traitorous publications in the whole country."
Nor, while his father lived, did he give any indications of a desire for power, or of any capacity for exercising it; but since he had been placed on the throne he had displayed great activity and energy, though he was still, in the opinion of many, more of a philosopher a detractor might said more of a pedant than of a statesman.
For, if he was wrong or exaggerated in his particulars, I had offended God much more in other matters that my detractor knew nothing about. And, methought, God favoured me much in not proclaiming my secret sins to all men. And, thus, I am very glad that my detractor should ever report a trifling lie about me, rather than the terrible truth.
But what were these miserable considerations, when the great interests of national literature, taste, and glory were at stake? I was the vile detractor, the impious scorner of these glories, and it was but justice that I should be put in the pillory and made the butt of rotten eggs.
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