sometimes been exchanged between us might be forgotten.

Unhappily an act, for which the law affords no redress, but which
I have no hesitation in pronouncing to be a gross injury to me
and a gross fraud on the public, has compelled me to do what I
should never have done willingly. A bookseller, named Vizetelly,
who seems to aspire to that sort of distinction which Curll
enjoyed a hundred and twenty years ago, thought fit, without
asking my consent, without even giving me any notice, to announce
an edition of my Speeches, and was not ashamed to tell the world
in his advertisement that he published them by special license.
When the book appeared, I found that it contained fifty-six
speeches, said to have been delivered by me in the House of
Commons. Of these speeches a few were reprinted from reports
which I had corrected for the Mirror of Parliament or the
Parliamentary Debates, and were therefore, with the exception of
some errors of the pen and the press, correctly given. The rest
bear scarcely the faintest resemblance to the speeches which I
really made. The substance of what I said is perpetually
misrepresented. The connection of the arguments is altogether
lost. Extravagant blunders are put into my mouth in almost every
page. An editor who was not grossly ignorant would have
perceived that no person to whom the House of Commons would
listen could possibly have been guilty of such blunders. An
editor who had the smallest regard for truth, or for the fame of
the person whose speeches he had undertaken to publish, would
have had recourse to the various sources of information which
were readily accessible, and, by collating them, would have
produced a book which would at least have contained no absolute
nonsense. But I have unfortunately had an editor whose only