I had complained, not of this merely, but of monstrous indefensible garbling and misrepresentation, pervading the whole work.  The dialogue is so managed, as often to suggest what is false concerning me, yet without asserting it; so as to enable him to disown the slander, while producing its full effect against me.  Of the directly false statements and garblings I gave several striking exhibitions.  His reply to all this in the first edition of his “Defence” was reviewed in a third article of the “Prospective Review,” Its ability and reach of thought are attested by the fact that it has been mistaken for the writing of Mr. Martineau; but (as clearly as reviews ever speak on such subjects) it is intimated in the opening that this new article is from a new hand, “at the risk of revealing division of persons and opinions within the limits of the mystic critical We.”  Who is the author, I do not know; nor can I make a likely guess at any one who was in more than distant intercourse with me.

This third reviewer did not bestow one page, as Mr. Martineau had done, on the “Eclipse;” did not summarily pronounce a broad sentence without details, but dedicated thirty-four pages to the examination and proof.  He opens with noticing the parallel which the author of the “Eclipse” has instituted between his use of ridicule and that of Pascal; and replies that he signally violates Pascal’s two rules, first, to speak with truth against one’s opponents and not with calumny; secondly, not to wound them needlessly.  “Neglect of the first rule (says he) has given to these books [the “Eclipse” and its “Defence”] their apparent controversial success; disregard of the second their literary point.”  He adds, “We shall show that their author misstates and misrepresents doctrines; garbles quotations, interpolating words which give the passage he cites reference to subjects quite foreign from those to which in the original they apply, while retaining the inverted commas, which are the proper sign of faithful transcription; that similarly, he allows himself the licence of omission of the very words on which the controversy hangs, while in appearance citing verbatim;... and that he habitually employs a sophistry too artful (we fear) to be undesigned.  May he not himself have been deceived, some indulgent render perhaps asks, by the fallacies which have been so successful with others?  It would be as reasonable to suppose that the grapes which deluded the birds must have deluded Zeuxis who painted them.”

So grave an accusation against my assailant’s truthfulness, coming not from me, but from a third party, and that, evidently a man who knew well what he was saying and why,—­could not be passed over unnoticed, although that religious world, which reads one side only, continued to buy the “Eclipse” and its “Defence” greedily, and not one in a thousand of them was likely to see the “Prospective Review,” In the second edition of the “Defence”