Sir:—I hope you will allow me to reply to a passage which you have (inadvertently, as I imagine) permitted to appear in your journal of yesterday, under cover of a pretended correction of an inaccuracy on your part. In the letter to which I refer, the editor of the Literary Gazette alludes in a very offensive manner to the step which I thought it necessary to take in causing to be printed, for gratuitous distribution to the subscribers of the Court Journal, a document which had been withheld from the actual pages of the journal solely from motives of delicacy, but which there was no longer any utility or delicacy in continuing to withhold, after the editor of the Literary Gazette had most indelicately and unjustifiably printed and advertised in all directions. The editor of the Literary Gazette, in his charge of “pirating,” reminds one of the cunning pickpocket, who, while in the act of running away, cries “stop thief,” in order to turn the pursuit from himself to somebody else. Of all the persons who have printed the document in question, the editor of the Literary Gazette alone is subject to the imputation of “pirating it,” because he alone has been guilty, either directly or indirectly, of a breach of confidence, in giving to the world what he knew was intended for private circulation only. Nay, in the very number of The Times in which his letter appears, there is an advertisement “from authority,” stating that “Lady Noel Byron has not authorized any bookseller whatever to publish her pamphlet, printed only for private circulation,” &c.

It is precisely the same with regard to the alleged “puffing” as the “pirating.” The editor of the Literary Gazette is the only person who, taking advantage of his own wrong, “puffed” what he had done; all I did being to make public the fact, that the document in question might be had gratis by all who had purchased, or might purchase, the Court Journal of the day. It is a little “too bad,” Sir, for the editor of the Literary Gazette to slander the Court Journal through the medium of your widely circulated pages, merely because it presented its readers with a document of the existence of which, but for the notice given in a previous number of the Court Journal, he would in all probability have been ignorant at this moment. I am, Sir, your obedient servant.