rofligate brother,
who gave Edgar's name whenever he got into a scrape, I may have
sometimes been credited with the sins of strangers. No one is free from
this sort of calumny. We all have heard of Sheridan's wicked witticism,
in that when taken up in Pall Mall for drunkenness, he gave his name
Wilberforce; and it is said that he got drunk on purpose to say so! My
venerable friend, Thomas Cooper, the pious and eloquent old Chartist,
has been similarly confused with Robert Cooper, the atheist, lecturer;
not but that Thomas had once been an atheist too. In this connection,
here is a curiously complicated case of _alibi_, which I abstract
_verbatim_ from one of my Archive-books.

"On Sunday, the 17th of September 1848, I was all the afternoon and
evening at my house on Furze Hill, Brighton, quietly reading and
teaching my children, &c. Next day the 'Rev. J.C. Richmond (an American
friend) called with me on the Rev. Mr. Vaughan, and in the course of
conversation the latter said to me in a good-natured tone of rebuke:
'Some of my congregation tell me they saw you yesterday afternoon
smoking a cigar in a fly on the Marine Parade.' I had hardly time to
deny the soft impeachment, which I might well have done with emphasis,
as a loather of cigars, and as little as possible a traveller on
Sundays, when Richmond broke out with 'That's impossible; for I saw him
myself in Shoreham Church (five miles distant), and noticed that he went
away in the middle of the sermon, as I supposed, to get home to Mrs.
Tupper.' Mr. Richmond says he could have made oath that I had been
there, and that he told several persons after church that I 'had heard
part of the sermon in the afternoon.' So, upon human and trustworthy
evidence, I could have been proved to have been in three places at
once."

My fetch similarly once rescued a young lady from death on Snowdon: at
least a stranger in company once came up to me, to thank me for my
prowess in having stopped his daughter's pony, which had run away down,
the mountain!--in vain I denied it:--and he addressed me by my name,
too! Somebody must have given him my card by accident.

And let me here allude (if I can without indelicacy) to another sort of
personation of more financial importance to myself. Lately, I have seen
some not very refined nor considerate paragraphs in American papers (Mr.
Bok, a Brooklyn editor, has told me that more than four hundred repeated
them) to the effect that in the battle