As it is no part of a manly disposition to use insulting epithets to an unknown enemy, who may, perhaps, have resolved to remain unknown, I shall not, at present, bestow any upon you. Long as you remain concealed, you are a nonentity; and any insults offered by me to a person in that situation might probably not be felt to carry with them any degradation to him, and certainly would not be felt as conferring any triumph upon me.
It is probable, however, that you will come forward from your
concealment, when you feel that you cannot continue in it without the consciousness
of cowardice. I,
| 2 | John Wilson to Macvey Napier, 23 October 1817 |
The Note which I understand to have been forwarded to you by my Publisher, will have explained why I did not receive your communication till within these few hours.
| Macvey Napier to John Wilson, 23 October 1817 | 3 |
If you be not a principal conductor or supporter of Blackwood’s Magazine, you have no reason for addressing me. If you be not the author or furnisher of materials for an attack on Mr McCormick, which you yourself stated to be highly unjustifiable, and of which you denied all knowledge, upon your honour—If you be not the Author of a most abusive attack on your friend Mr Wordsworth—If you did not, by an unfounded story, prevail with Mr Blackwood’s former Editors to insert that attack—if you be not the secret traducer of Mr Playfair, Mr Hazlitt, and Mr Coleridge—If you be not the wanton and cruel reviler of those gentlemen named in my Pamphlet, with whom you had lived in habits of friendship—If you be not one of the principal vomitories of that calumnious and malignant abuse which has, through the medium of Blackwood’s Magazine, been poured out on all that is elevated, worthy, or estimable—If you be not the writer of one or other of the Letters addressed in the name of Z. to Mr Leigh Hunt,—and if you did not take shelter under a quotation from Junius, and submit to be publicly stigmatised by him as a coward and a scoundrel—then you have nothing to say to me, for I speak only of the writer or writers who have committed these enormities. But if all or any of these things apply to you, in that case you have lost every claim to the character of a gentleman, and have no right whatsoever to demand that satisfaction which is due only to one who has been unjustly accused.
The cause, besides, in which I have engaged is a pub-
| 4 | Macvey Napier to John Wilson, 23 October 1817 |
Prove to the satisfaction of the Public that the charges which I have made are unfounded, or that they do not apply to you—Or, as you yourself ask of Mr Hunt,—“Confess that you have done wrong—make a clear breast of it,—beg pardon of your God and of your country, for the iniquity of your polluted pen—and the last to add one pang to the secret throbbings of a contrite spirit,” the first to meet your challenge, if then renewed, shall be,
P. S.—As Mr Lockhart obviously acts in concert with yourself,—I have made the same answer to him which I now make to you.