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