by believing at once in the perfect
malice of the slanderer, and the perfect truth of his slanders.

Here then, in this Procopius, is an instance of the gloomy libeller,
whose very gloom makes affidavit of his foul spirit from the first.
There is also another form, less odious, of the hostile libeller: it
occurs frequently in cases where the writer is not chargeable with
secret malice, but is in a monstrous passion. A shower-bath might be of
service in that case, whereas in the Procopius case nothing but a
copious or a _Pro_copius application of the knout can answer. We, for
instance, have (or had, for perhaps it has been stolen) a biography of
that same Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, with whom Andrew Marvell
'and others who called Milton friend' had such rough-and-tumble feuds
about 1666, and at whose expense it was that Marvell made the whole
nation merry in his 'Rehearsal Transprosed.' This Parker had a 'knack'
at making himself odious; he had a _curiosa felicitas_ in attracting
hatreds, and wherever he lodged for a fortnight he trailed after him a
vast parabolic or hyperbolic tail of enmity and curses, all smoke and
fire and tarnish, which bore the same ratio to his small body of merit
that a comet's tail, measuring billions of miles, does to the little
cometary mass. The rage against him was embittered by politics, and
indeed sometimes by knavish tricks; the first not being always
'confounded,' nor the last 'frustrated.' So that Parker, on the whole,
was a man whom it might be held a duty to hate, and therefore, of
course, to knout as often as you could persuade him to expose a fair
extent of surface for the action of the lash. Many men purchased a knout
for his sake, and took their chance for getting a 'shy' at him, as
Parker might happen to favour their intentions. But one furious
gentleman, who is resolved to 'take his full change' out of Parker, and
therefore to lose no time, commences operations in the very first words
of his biography: 'Parker,' says he, 'the author of ----, was the _spawn_
of Samuel Parker.' His rage will not wait for an opportunity; he throws
off a torrent of fiery sparks in advance, and gives full notice to
Parker that he will run his train right into him, if he can come up with
his rear. This man is not malicious, but truculent; like the elder
Scaliger, of whom it was observed that, having been an officer of
cavalry up to his fortieth year (when he took to learning Greek), he
always