And now, after the Saturday Review has condescended severely and sententiously to bepreach me, I must be permitted a trifling return in kind.  As is declared by the French an objectionable people which prefers la gloire to “duty,” and even places “honour” before “honesty,” the calling of the Fourth Estate is un sacerdoce, an Apostolate:  it is a high and holy mission whose ends are the diffusion of Truth and Knowledge and the suppression of Ignorance and Falsehood.  “Sacrilege,” with this profession, means the breaking of its two great commandments and all sins of commission and omission suggested and prompted by vain love of fame, by sordid self-esteem or by ignoble rancour.  What then shall we say of a paper which, professedly established to “counteract the immorality of The Times,” adds to normal journalistic follies, offences and mistakes an utter absence of literary honour, systematic misrepresentation, malignity and absolute ruffianism?  Let those who hold such language exaggerated glance at my piece justicative, the Saturday’s article (June 28, ’88) upon Mr. Hitchman’s “Biography of Sir Richard Burton.”  No denizen of Grub Street in the coarse old day of British mob-savagery could have produced a more damning specimen of wilful falsehood, undignified scurrility and brutal malevolence, in order to gratify a well-known pique, private and personal.  The “Saturday Reviler”—­there is, I repeat, much virtue in a soubriquet—­has grown only somewhat feebler, not kindlier, not more sympathetic since the clever author of “In Her Majesty’s Keeping” styled this Magister Morum “the benignant and judicious foster-parent of literature”; and since Darwin wrote of it (ii. 260) “One cannot expect fairness in a reviewer;” nor has it even taken to heart what my friend Swinburne declared (anent its issue of December 15, ’83) “clumsy and shallow snobbery can do no harm.”  Like other things waxing obsolete it has served, I hasten to confess, a special purpose in the world of letters.  It has lived through a generation of thirty years in the glorification of the mediocrities and in pandering to the impish taint of poor human nature, the ungenerous passions of those who abhor the novel, the original, the surprising, the startling, and who are only too glad to witness and to assist in the Procrustes’ process of trimming and lengthening out thoughts and ideas and diction that rise or strive to rise above the normal and vulgar plane.  This virtual descendant of the ancestral Satirist, after long serving as a spawning-ground to envy, hatred and malice, now enters upon the decline of an unworthy old age.  Since the death of its proprietor, Mr. Beresford-Hope, it has been steadily going down hill as is proved by its circulation, once 15,000, and now something nearer 5,000 than 10,000.  It has become a poor shadow of its former self—­preserving the passive ill- will but lacking the power of active malevolence—­when journalists were often compelled to decline correspondence upon its misjudgments