Note 447 — THE BIOGRAPHY OF THE BOOK AND ITS REVIEWERS REVIEWED.

These Vigilants and Purifiers, with that hypocritical severity which ever makes the worst sinner in private the most rigorous judge in public, lately had the imprudent impudence to summons a publisher who had reprinted the Decameron with the “objectionable passages” in French. Mr. Alderman Faudell Phillips had the good sense contemptuously to dismiss the summons. Englishmen are no longer what they were if they continue to tolerate this ignoble espionage of vicious and prurient virtuous “Associations.” If they mean real work why do they commence by condemning scholar-like works, instead of cleansing the many foul cesspools of active vice which are a public disgrace to London.