About mid-September, when Mr. Stead still lay in durance vile, a sub-editor Mr. Morley (Jun.) applied to me for an interview which I did not refuse. It was by no means satisfactory except to provide his paper with “copy.” I found him labouring hard to place me “in the same box” with his martyred principal and to represent my volume (“a book of archaic delights”) as a greater outrage on public decency than the two-penny pamphlet. This, as said the _London Figaro_ (September 19, ’85), is a “monstrous and absurd comparison.” It became evident to me, during the first visit, that I was to play the part of Mr. Pickwick between two rival races of editors, the pornologists and the anti-pornologists; and, having no stomach for such sport I declined the rôle. In reply to a question about critics my remark to the interviewer was, “I have taken much interest in what the classics call Skiomachia and I shall allow Anonymus and Anonyma to howl unanswered. I shall also treat with scornful silence the miserables who, when shown a magnificent prospect, a landscape adorned with the highest charms of Nature and Art, can only see in a field corner here and there a little heap of muck. ‘You must have been looking for it, Madam!’ said, or is said to have said, sturdy old Doctor Samuel Johnson.”
Moreover Mr. Morley’s style of reporting “interviews” was somewhat too advanced and American—that is, too personal, too sensation-mongering and too nauseously familiar—to suit my taste; and I would have none other of them. Hereupon being unable to make more copy out of the case the _Pall Mall Gazette_ let loose at me a German Jew penny-a-liner, who signs himself Sigma. This _pauvre diable_ delivered himself of two articles, “Pantagruelism or Pornography?” (September 14, ’85) and “The Ethics of the Dirt” (September 19, ’85), wherein with matchless front of brass he talks of the “unsullied British breakfast-table,” so pleasantly provided with pepper by his immaculate editor. And since that time the _Pall Mall Gazette_ has never ceased to practise at my expense its old trade, falsehood and calumny, and the right of private judgment, sentence and execution. In hopes that his splenatic and vindictive fiction might bear fruit, at one time the _Pall Mall Gazette_ has “heard that the work was to be withdrawn from circulation” (when it never circulated). Then, “it was resolved by the authorities to request Captain Burton not to issue the third volume and to prosecute him if he takes no notice of the invitation;” and, finally, “Government has at last determined to put down Captain Burton with a strong hand.” All about as true as the political articles which the _Pall Mall Gazette_ indites with such heroic contempt for truth, candour and honesty. One cannot but apply to the “Gutter Gazette” the words of the Rev. Edward Irving:—“I mean by the British Inquisition that court whose ministers and agents carry on their operations in secret; who drag every man’s most private affairs before the sight of thousands and seek to mangle and destroy his life, trying him without a witness, condemning him without a hearing, nor suffering him to speak for himself; intermeddling in things of which they have no knowledge and cannot on any principle have a jurisdiction. * * * I mean the ignorant, unprincipled, unhallowed spirit of criticism, which in this Protestant country is producing as foul effects against truth, and by as dishonest means as ever did the Inquisition of Rome” (p. 5 “Preliminary Discourse to Ben Ezra,” etc.).