for explanation for a full month,--during which time I must needs lie
writhing and tossing under the cruel imputation of nonentity.--Good
heavens! that a plain man must not be allowed _to be!_

"They call this an age of personality: but surely this spirit of
anti-personality (if I may so express it) is something worse.

"Take away my moral reputation,--I may live to discredit that calumny.
Injure my literary fame,--I may write that up again. But when a
gentleman is robbed of his identity, where is he?

"Other murderers stab but at our existence, a frail and perishing trifle
at the best. But here is an assassin who aims at our very essence,--who
not only forbids us _to be_ any longer, but _to have been_ at all. Let
our ancestors look to it.

"Is the parish register nothing? Is the house in Princes Street,
Cavendish Square, where we saw the light six-and-forty years ago,
nothing? Were our progenitors from stately Genoa, where we flourished
four centuries back, before the barbarous name of Boldero[3] was known
to a European mouth, nothing? Was the goodly scion of our name,
transplanted into England in the reign of the seventh Henry, nothing?
Are the archives of the steelyard, in succeeding reigns, (if haply they
survive the fury of our envious enemies,) showing that we flourished in
prime repute, as merchants, down to the period of the Commonwealth,
nothing?

"'Why, then the world, and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing.'