The personal element is conspicuous in the Brazilian journalism, and for a considerable period of its history libellous attacks on persons, signed by professional sponsors, popularly called testas de ferro (iron heads), were admitted at so much a line in the best newspapers.
At the Restoration he signed the declaration required by the Act of Uniformity, and on this account he was the subject of a libellous attack, published in 1665, entitled Covenant-Renouncers Desperate Apostates.
Voltaire, who had been sent home, submitted, and for a time pretended to work in a Parisian lawyer's office; but he again manifested a faculty for getting into trouble - this time in the still more dangerous way of writing libellous poems - so that his father was glad to send him to stay for nearly a year (1714-15) with Louis de Caumartin, marquis de Saint-Ange, in the country.
It is said that Rabelais met and quarrelled with Joachim du Bellay the poet at Rome, and with Ronsard at Meudon and elsewhere, that this caused a breach between him and the Pleiade, that he satirized its classicizing tendencies in the episode of the Limousin scholar, and that Ronsard after his death avenged himself by a libellous epitaph.
Lastly, the epitaph, read impartially, is not libellous at all, but simply takes up the vein of the opening scenes of Gargantua in reference to Gargantua's author.
