ravations, perhaps, known to the
libellers as encouragements for proceeding at the time, and often enough
likely to exist in other men's cases. Now, in the case as it actually
occurred, it so happened that the malicious writers had, by the libel,
dishonoured themselves too deeply in the public opinion, to venture upon
coming forward, in their own persons, to avow their own work; but
suppose them to have done so (as, in fact, even in this case, they might
have done, had they not published their intention of driving a regular
trade in libel and in slander); suppose them insolently to beard you in
public haunts; to cross your path continually when in company with the
very female relative upon whom they had done their best to point the
finger of public scorn; and suppose them further, by the whole artillery
of contemptuous looks, words, gestures, and unrepressed laughter, to
republish, as it were, ratify, and publicly to apply, personally, their
own original libel, as often as chance or as opportunity (eagerly
improved) should throw you together in places of general resort; and
suppose, finally, that the central figure--nay, in their account, the
very butt throughout this entire drama of malice--should chance to be an
innocent, gentle-hearted, dejected, suffering woman, utterly unknown to
her persecutors, and selected as their martyr merely for her
relationship to yourself--suppose her, in short, to be your wife--a
lovely young woman sustained by womanly dignity, or else ready to sink
into the earth with shame, under the cruel and unmanly insults heaped
upon her, and having no protector upon earth but yourself: lay all this
together, and then say whether, in such a case, the most philosophic or
the most Christian patience might not excusably give way; whether flesh
and blood could do otherwise than give way, and seek redress for the
past, but, at all events, security for the future, in what, perhaps,
might be the sole course open to you--an appeal to arms. Let it not be
said that the case here proposed, by way of hypothesis, is an extreme
one: for the very argument has contemplated extreme cases: since, whilst
conceding that duelling is an unlawful and useless remedy for cases of
ordinary wrong, where there is no malice to resist a more conciliatory
mode of settlement, and where it is difficult to imagine any deliberate
insult except such as is palliated by intoxication--conceding this, I
have yet supposed it possible that ca