Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/46

 has been an unnatural mother, but are we therefore to be unnatural children? Should we glory in a mother's shame?

Let me quote the warm language of a modern writer, whose bias lay in an opposite direction, and whose words come fresh from a conscience freeing itself from such ingratitude.

There is one more evil desertion of truth, which I fear cannot be ascribed to any wish to "adorn your tale," although you have thereby been enabled to convey it in a form less manifestly offensive. You say,

I can the less lay this to the account of the fiction, because it is manifestly the one object of your whole attack upon these writers; whether out of private friendship to Dr. Hampden, or of alarm for yourself, as a member of the same school—nam tua res agitur, cum proximus ardet Ucalegon—it is notorious that you imagined these writers to be the principal authors of the measures taken in consequence of that unhappy appointment, and that your avowed object was, to "effect a diversion ." Herein you were mistaken; since there prevailed