is as follows: (1) We gave the statement of
which the Cardinal complains as a mere rumour current on any good
authority at the time of our publication, and we employed every means in
our power to test its accuracy, though the only other narratives which
had then reached England were, as the Cardinal says (p. 9), too "partial
and perverted" to enable us to sift it to the bottom. We stated that a
rumour was current, not that its purport was true. (2) We did not speak
of "only two addresses" actually submitted to the Commission. We
supposed the report to mean, that of the three possible forms of
address, two extreme and one mean, each of which actually had partisans
in the Commission, the middle or moderate form was the one finally
adopted. (3) We had no suspicion that the Cardinal had proposed any
violent address at all; we did not know that such a proposal had been,
or was about to be, attributed to him; and there was no connection
whatever between him and it either in our mind or in our language. (4)
We implied no censure either on the course proposed or on its proposer,
still less on the Cardinal personally. (5) The articles in _The Patrie_
first appeared--and that in France--some days after our Review was in
the hands of the public; we know nothing of the authority on which their
statements were founded, and we have not the least sympathy either with
the politics or the motives of that newspaper.

This reply would be enough for our own defence; but it is right that we
should show, on the other side, how it came to pass that the Cardinal
was led to subject our words to that construction which we have so much
reason to regret. Reading them by the light of his own knowledge, and
through the medium of the false reports which afterwards arose with
regard to himself, his interpretation of them may easily have appeared
both plausible and likely. For there were more draft addresses than one:
one was his; the actual address was a compromise between them, and he
had been falsely accused of, and severely censured for, proposing
violent courses in his address. Knowing this, he was tempted to suspect
a covert allusion to himself under our words, and the chronological
relation between our own article and those of _The Patrie_ was easily
forgotten, or made nugatory by the supposition of their both being
derived from the same sources of information.

But this will be made clearer by the following narrative of facts: A
Commission was