And not always have they thus prevailed against the pack.  Too often has the sorry spectacle been seen of greatness and goodness going down before the poisonous tongues and the licking jaws.  Even Caesar himself had to fall at last, his strong soul perhaps not sorry to escape through his dagger-wounds from so pitiably small a world; and the poison in the death-cup of Socrates was not so much the juice of the hemlock as the venom of the gossips of Athens.

In later times, no service to his country, no greatness of character, can save the noble Raleigh from the tongues determined to bring him to the block; and, when the haughty head of Marie Antoinette must bow at last upon the scaffold, the true guillotine was the guillotine of gossip.  It was such lying tales as that of the diamond necklace that had brought her there.  All Queen Elizabeth’s popularity could not save her from the ribaldry of scandal, nor Shakespeare’s genius protect his name from the foulest of stains.

In our own time, the mere mention of the name of Dreyfus suffices to remind us of the terrible nets woven by this dark spinner.  Within the last year or two, have we not seen the loved king of a great nation driven to seek protection from the spectre of innuendo in the courts of law?  But gossip laughs at such tribunals.  It knows that where once it has affixed its foul stain, the mark remains forever, indelible as that imaginary stain which not all the multitudinous seas could wash from the little hand of Lady Macbeth.  The more the stain is washed, the more persistently it reappears, like Rizzio’s blood, as they say, in Holyrood Palace.  To deny a rumour is but to spread it.  An action for libel, however it may be decided, has at least the one inevitable result of perpetuating it.

Take the historical case of the Man with the Iron Mask.  Out of pure deviltry, it would appear, Voltaire started the story, as mere a fiction as one of his written romances, that the mysterious prisoner was no less than a half-brother of Louis XIV; and Dumas, seeing the dramatic possibilities of the legend, picturesquely elaborates it in Le Vicomte de Bragelonne.  Never, probably, was so impudent an invention, and surely never one so successful; for it is in vain that historians expose it over and over again.  Learned editors have proved with no shadow of a doubt that the real man of the mask was an obscure Italian political adventurer; but though scholars may be convinced, the world will have nothing of your Count Matthioli, and will probably go on believing Voltaire’s story to the end of time.

“At least there must have been something in it” is always the last word on such debatable matters; and the curious thing is that, whenever a doubt of the truth is expressed, it is never the victim, but always the scandal, to which the benefit of the doubt is extended.  Whatever the proven fact, the world always prefers to hold fast by the disreputable doubt.