Here then, on the one side, are our English _éloges_. And we may add that amongst the Methodists, the Baptists, and other religious sectaries, but especially among the missionaries of all nations and churches, this class of _éloges_ is continually increasing. Not unfrequently men of fervent natures and of sublime aspirations are thus rescued from oblivion, whilst the great power of such bodies as the Methodists, their growing wealth, and consequent responsibility to public opinion, are pledges that they will soon command all the advantages of colleges and academic refinement; so that if, in the manner of these funeral _éloges_, there has sometimes been missed that elegance which should have corresponded to the weight of the matter, henceforwards we may look to see this disadvantage giving way before institutions more thoroughly matured. But if these are our _éloges_, on the other hand, where are our libels?
This is likely to be a topic of offence, for many readers will start at hearing the upright Samuel Johnson and the good-humoured, garrulous Plutarch denounced as traffickers in libel. But a truth is a truth. And the temper is so essentially different in which men lend themselves to the propagation of defamatory anecdotes, the impulses are so various to an offence which is not always consciously perceived by those who are parties to it, that we cannot be too cautious of suffering our hatred of libel to involve every casual libeller, or of suffering our general respect for the person of the libeller to exonerate him from the charge of libelling. Many libels are written in this little world of ours unconsciously, and under many motives. Perhaps we said that before, but no matter. Sometimes a gloomy fellow, with a murderous cast of countenance, sits down doggedly to the task of blackening one whom he hates worse 'than toad or asp.' For instance, Procopius performs that 'labour of hate' for the Emperor Justinian, pouring oil into his wounds, but, then (as Coleridge expresses it in a 'neat' sarcasm), oil of vitriol. Nature must have meant the man for a Spanish Inquisitor, sent into the world before St. Dominic had provided a trade for him, or any vent for his malice--so rancorous in his malignity, so horrid and unrelenting the torture to which he subjects his sovereign and the beautiful Theodora. In this case, from the withering scowl which accompanies the libels, we may be assured that they _are_ such in the most aggravated form--not malicious only, but false. It is commonly said, indeed, in our courts, that truth it is which aggravates the libel. And so it is as regards the feelings or the interests of the man libelled. For is it not insufferable that, if a poor man under common human infirmity shall have committed some crime and have paid its penalty, but afterwards reforming or out-growing his own follies, seeks to gain an honest livelihood for his children in a place which the knowledge of his past transgression has not reached, then all at once he is to be ruined by some creature purely malignant who discovers and publishes the secret tale? In such a case most undoubtedly it is the truth of the libel which constitutes its sting, since, if it were not true or could be made questionable, it would do the poor man no mischief. But, on the other hand, it is the falsehood of the libel which forms its aggravation as regards the publisher. And certain we are, had we no other voucher than the instinct of our hatred to Procopius, that his disloyal tales about his great lord and lady are odiously overcharged, if not uniformly false. Gibbon, however, chooses to gratify his taste for the luxury of scandal by believing at once in the perfect malice of the slanderer, and the perfect truth of his slanders.