ed inaccuracy, in identifying the house,
not one syllable after _that_, which he could have said on any other
subject, would have won any confidence, or deserved any, from a
judicious reader. I may now mention--the Herod being dead whose
persecutions I had reason to fear--that the house in question stands in
Greek Street on the west, and is the house on that side nearest to
Soho-Square, but without looking into the Square. This it was hardly
safe to mention at the date of the published Confessions. It was my
private opinion, indeed, that there were probably twenty-five chances to
one in favour of my friend the attorney having been by that time hanged.
But then this argued inversely; one chance to twenty-five that my friend
might be _un_hanged, and knocking about the streets of London; in which
case it would have been a perfect god-send to him that here lay an
opening (of _my_ contrivance, not _his_) for requesting the opinion of a
jury on the amount of _solatium_ due to his wounded feelings in an
action on the passage in the Confessions. To have indicated even the
street would have been enough. Because there could surely be but one
such Grecian in Greek Street, or but one that realized the other
conditions of the unknown quantity. There was also a separate danger not
absolutely so laughable as it sounds. Me there was little chance that
the attorney should meet; but my book he might easily have met
(supposing always that the warrant of _Sus. per coll._ had not yet on
_his_ account travelled down to Newgate.) For he was literary; admired
literature; and, as a lawyer, he wrote on some subjects fluently; Might
he not publish _his_ Confessions? Or, which would be worse, a supplement
to mine--printed so as exactly to match? In which case I should have had
the same affliction that Gibbon the historian dreaded so much; viz. that
of seeing a refutation of himself, and his own answer to the refutation,
all bound up in one and the same self-combating volume. Besides, he
would have cross-examined me before the public in Old Bailey style; no
story, the most straightforward that ever was told, could be sure to
stand _that_. And my readers might be left in a state of painful doubt
whether _he_ might not, after all, have been a model of suffering
innocence--I (to say the kindest thing possible) plagued with the
natural treacheries of a schoolboy's memory. In taking leave of this
case and the remembrances connected with it, let me say tha