“We have spoken severely with regard to the last” (my version), says the Reviewer (p.185), and verily I thank him therefor.  Laudari ab illaudato has never been my ambition.  A writer so learned and so disinterested could hurt my feelings and mortify my pride only by approving me and praising me.  Nor have I any desire to be exalted in the pages of the Edinburgh, so famous for its incartades of old.  As Dryden says, “He has done me all the honour that any man can receive from him, which is to be railed at by him.”  I am content to share the vituperation of this veteran—­incapable in company with the poetaster George Gordon who suffered for “this Lord’s station;” with that “burnish fly in the pride of May,” Macaulay, and with the great trio, Darwin, Huxley and Hooker, who also have been the butts of his bitter and malignant abuse (April ’63 and April ’73).  And lastly I have no stomach for sweet words from the present Editor of the Edinburgh Mr. Henry Reeve, a cross and cross-grained old man whose surly temper is equalled only by his ignoble jealousy of another’s success.  Let them bedevil the thin-skinned with their godless ribaldry; for myself peu m’importe—­my shoulders are broad enough to bear all their envy, hatred and malice.

During the three years which have elapsed since I first began printing my book I have not had often to complain of mere gratuitous impertinence, and a single exception deserves some notice.  The following lines which I addressed to The Academy (August 11, ’88) will suffice to lay my case before my readers:—­

The Bestial Element in Man.

“One hesitates to dissent from so great an authority as Sir Richard Burton on all that relates to the bestial element in man.”  So writes (p. xii., Introduction to the Fables of Pilpay), with uncalled-for impertinence, Mr. Joseph Jacobs, who goes out of his way to be offensive, and who confesses to having derived all his knowledge of my views not from “the notorious Terminal Essay of the Nights,” but from the excellent article by Mr. Thomas Davidson on “Beast-fables,” in Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, Edinburgh, 1888.  This lofty standpoint of morality was probably occupied for a reason by a writer who dedicates “To my dear wife” a volume rich in anecdotes grivoises, and not poor in language the contrary of conventional.  However, I suffer from this Maccabee in good society together with Prof.  Max Muller (pp. xxvi. and xxxiii.), Mr. Clouston (pp. xxxiii. and xxxv.), Byron (p. xlvi.), Theodor Benfey (p. xlvii.), Mr. W. G. Rutherford (p. xlviii.), and Bishop Lightfoot (p. xlix.).  All this eminent half-dozen is glanced at, with distinct and several sneers, in a little volume which, rendered useless by lack of notes and index, must advertise itself by the reclame of abuse.

As regards the reminiscence of Homo Darwinienesis by Homo Sapiens, doubtless it would ex hypothesi be common to mankind.  Yet to me Africa is the old home of the Beast-fable, because Egypt was the inventor of the alphabet, the cradle of letters, the preacher of animism and metempsychosis, and, generally, the source of all human civilisation.