s disadvantage. But
with that note of mine in his hand, protesting against an ominous and
fatal omission as regards the confessed influences that had operated on
Stevenson, he goes on, or allows Mr Geake to go on, quite as though he
had verified matters and found that I was wrong as regards the facts on
which I based my appeal to him for recognition of Thoreau as having
influenced Stevenson in style. Had he attended to correcting his serious
errors about Stevenson, and some at least of those about Burns, thus
adding, say, a dozen or twenty pages to his book wholly fresh and new and
accurate, then the _Times_ could not have got, even if it had sought, an
injunction against his publishers and him; and there would have been no
necessity that he should pad out other and later speeches by just a
little whining over what was entirely due to his own disregard of good
advice, his own neglect--his own fault--a neglect and a fault showing
determination not to revise where revision in justice to his subject's
own free and frank acknowledgments made it most essential and necessary.

Mr Justice North gave his decision against Lord Rosebery and his
publishers, while the Lords of Appeal went in his favour; but the House
of Lords reaffirmed the decision of Mr Justice North and granted a
perpetual injunction against this book. The copyright in his speech is
Lord Rosebery's, but the copyright in the _Times_' report is the
_Times_'. You see one of the ideas underlying the law is that no manner
of speech is quite perfect as the man speaks it, or is beyond revision,
improvement, or extension, and, if there is but one _verbatim_ report, as
was the case of some of these speeches and addresses, then it is
incumbent on the author, if he wishes to preserve his copyright, to
revise and correct his speeches and addresses, so as to make them at
least in details so far differ from the reported form. This thing ought
Lord Rosebery to have done, on ethical and literary _grounds_, not to
speak of legal and self-interested grounds; and I, for one, who from the
first held exactly the view the House of Lords has affirmed, do confess
that I have no sympathy for Lord Rosebery, since he had before him the
suggestion and the materials for as substantial alterations and additions
from my own hands, with as much more for other portions of his book, had
he informed me of his appreciation, as would have saved him and his book
from such a sadly ironical fate a