“I shall not condescend to repeat the slanders you have lately uttered. I am saved the necessity of refuting them. The pen and the tongue have already accomplished this. Higher names than mine have endorsed the refutation. In the House of Commons, Duncombe, Walmsley, Bright and Dudley Stuart, have nailed the lie to the wall.
“I know not what course M. Kossuth may pursue towards you. Doubtless he may treat you with that dignified silence he has hitherto observed. He can well afford it. He need not fear to be silent. He shall not lack defenders.
“You may double your staff of facile scribes, and arm each of them with a plume plucked from the fetid wing of the Austrian eagle. You will find among the champions of truth, brains as clear and pens as clever as your own; and though you may stuff your columns with wordy sophistry, it will be scattered like chaff before the heaven-born wind.
“I repeat it, M. Kossuth can afford to treat you with sublime silence; but I, who am gifted neither with the divine endurance nor Christian forbearance of that noble man—I cannot help telling you the contempt I feel for you and yours. I feel the paucity of language to express it, and I doubt not but that every Englishman will experience a similar difficulty. True, we might get over that by borrowing a little from your vocabulary, but I shall not condescend to do so. Even now I feel that I am sinking the gentleman in coming thus forward a second time to call you to account.
“But as the citizen of a country by you disgraced—as the friend of a man by you injured—I cannot submit myself to silence. When you charge M. Kossuth and other Hungarian leaders with a violation of our hospitality, I cannot do otherwise than pronounce your statements false. You perhaps do not know how much you yourself are indebted to the high respect which these gentlemen have for the laws of English hospitality. But for that, sir, I can assure you that you would long since have been dragged from your incognito, and treated in a manner I will not describe; and although I for one should not approve of such a proceeding, I could not deny that you have done all in your power to deserve it. But if the laws of our country protect you, they also protect the stranger from personal insult. The host has duties as well as the guest, and may equally violate the laws of hospitality. You, sir, have been guilty of that violation.
“I call upon you, then, to make some atonement for the wrong you have done, to apologise to the man you have wronged, to your countrymen, whose honour you have compromised, whose intelligence you have insulted. I counsel you to this course, which you will find the most prudent. Do not affect to despise my counsel. Do not imagine, like Macbeth, that by ‘becoming worse,’ and keeping up a meretricious swagger, you may extricate yourself from your unhappy position. This, be assured, you can never do. Powerful as you fancy yourself, you are not strong enough to defy public opinion. You may flounce about the lobbies of a theatre—you may frown upon the manager, and frighten the trembling débutante—you may, now and then, make merit for yourself by holding up to public execration some unfortunate wretch who, having miscalculated the amount of black-mail, has made you an inadequate offer; but fancy not, for all this, that you are omnipotent: you cannot annihilate one atom of truth. The humblest gentleman in England may condemn and defy you.
“Mayne Reid.
“14, Alpha Road, Regent’s Park.
“April 16, 1853.”
The language of this letter seems now somewhat inflated. Allowance must be made for the feelings of the writer, which, naturally sensitive, were then strongly stirred by his friendship for Kossuth and his enthusiasm for a popular cause.