Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/121

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editor of the "Times,"—briefly stating, that with the exception that he had prepared the mortgage,—"the entire paragraph was untrue." Mr Norton's solicitor having attempted some explanation in reply, Mr Leman published a complete statement of the drawing out of the contract, together with the contract itself; and concluded his letter by requesting those who might read it, to decide for themselves, whether the entire paragraph, with the exception made, was or or was not "untrue."

It was then my turn to repel the accusations published by my husband. I might have answered, (as my brother's solicitor had answered Mr Norton's advertisement in 1837;) "the whole of it is false"; for, to contradict every falsehood, would have been to contradict every line. I left much unnoticed. My object was to keep clearly and steadily to this broad general contradiction:—that neither our quarrel in 1836 nor our dispute in 1854, had anything whatever to do with Lord Melbourne. I left unheeded, then, the cold and stupid sneer which stamped my distress in the county court as "acting"; and the observations (made in a like spirit) as to my grief at first parting with my children, being "a pretence to excite public sympathy;" though in the very same sentence, Mr Norton relates the lamentable death of the youngest under circumstances that might well wring the hardest heart. I left unnoticed the whole fable of the seizure of Lord Melbourne's letters, and the wicked inventions respecting my Mother and Brother, both deceased. I left to the common sense of those who might read Mr Norton's letter, very many of his manifest self-contradictions; such as calling on his readers to "judge of his surprise" on finding, "only two or three weeks ago" that I had the annuity from Lord Melbourne's family, and of his disinclination to continue my allowance "for one hour" after he knew that fact; not perceiving, in his blind effort to prove me base, instead of himself,—that his own data confounded him:—that the simplest of his readers might