When the rumour goes abroad that some notable man has been actually crushed,--been positively driven over by an entire Juggernaut's car of criticism till his literary body be a mere amorphous mass,--then a real success has been achieved, and the Alf of the day has done a great thing; but even the crushing of a poor Lady Carbury, if it be absolute, is effective.

Such a review will not make all the world call for the 'Evening Pulpit', but it will cause those who do take the paper to be satisfied with their bargain.
Whenever the circulation of such a paper begins to slacken, the proprietors should, as a matter of course, admonish their Alf to add a little power to the crushing department.
Lady Carbury had been crushed by the 'Evening Pulpit.' We may fancy that it was easy work, and that Mr Alf's historical Mr Jones was not forced to fatigue himself by the handling of many books of reference.
The errors did lie a little near the surface; and the whole scheme of the work, with its pandering to bad tastes by pretended revelations of frequently fabulous crime, was reprobated in Mr Jones's very best manner.

But the poor authoress, though utterly crushed, and reduced to little more than literary pulp for an hour or two, was not destroyed.
On the following morning she went to her publishers, and was closeted for half an hour with the senior partner, Mr Leadham.

'I've got it all in black and white,' she said, full of the wrong which had been done her, 'and can prove him to be wrong.

It was in 1522 that the man first came to Paris, and he couldn't have been her lover before that.