The Sun.
London, England, 1868-09-22 00:00:00

711 E ANGLO-CONTINENTAL SOCIETY.

The following letter has been addressed to
the Guardian:—

SlR,—The Syndicate of Naples, under the
pressure of public opinion, served notice to
quit on Prota and his editorial staff. No
reporters are admitted to the deliberations of
the Syndicate, and therefore its proceedings
are not made public. Relying on this bye-law,
Prota boldly denied that he had been expelled
from S. Domenico Maggiore, and insisted that
he had voluntarily resigned. An English
gentleman, resident in Italy, then asked a
member of the Syndicate what the real state of
the case was, and he received the answer which
Mr. Clay has quoted. Still Prota stuck to his
denial; whereupon the same member of the
Syndicate, being again appealed to, stated in
black and white that Prota was expelled ; but
he expressed, very naturally, a wish that his
name should not be mixed up in the matter.
Mr. Clay says "he saw the note," and that
it was " unintelligible." I saw it too, and found
nothing "unintelligible" in it. But that may
be owing to the fact that I spent, 1 believe,
as many months in Naples as Mr. Clay spent
days when he went to sit in judgment on the
British residents and to overhaul the decisions
of the Syndicate. I have no " wish to keep "
Mr. Clay " silent," or to " tie his tongue;"
I merely say that the " note " in question
was shown to him and to me in confidence,
that I made no reference to it, though it would
have been of great service to me, and that I
now refer to it under protest, and in order to
do justice to an honourable man whom Mr.
Clay has misrepresented—possibly from an
imperfect recollection of facts with which he is
not familiar. That was all I meant when I
said that his statement was "literally untrue."
I cannot understand Mr. Clay's quarrel with
the " Magistrate," who simply gave a plain
answer to a plain question. Do Mr. Clay and
Mr. Meyrick really mean that the members of
the Syndicate of Naples are under any obliga-
tion to produce the evidence on which their
decisions are founded for the supervision of
an agent of the Anglo-Continental Society,
or any other stranger who may apply to them?
Mr. Meyrick, in the face of Mr. Hogg's letter,
too, repeats that Prota was " condemned un-
heard." My reply is, that Prota admitted, in
a letter which still exists, that he had mis-
appropriated to his own personal use a large
part of the grant which the Italian Reforma-
tion Fund made to him ; secondly, that he
asserted, what even Mr. Clay now admits to
be a falsehood, that he was not expelled from
S. Domenico Maggiore ; thirdly, that he was
invited to clear himself from the scandalous
reports which were afloat concerning him,
and undertook to do so ; and, fourthly, that he
fulfilled that promise by getting a verdict of
acquittal from the paid staff of his own news-
paper.

Meyriek says that "the Rev. W. C.
Langdon and the Rev. J. G. Clay heard both
sides," and " learnt that " the rumours about
Prota " were false." Mr. Clay has broken
silence, and has not even pretended to adduce
one scintilla of evidence in favour of Prota
which the English Churchmen at Naples were
ignorant of when they severed their connec-
tion with the Einanapatore Cattolico. Mr.
Langdon has hitherto preserved an ominous
silence. I saw a letter from him which is