Libellous meaning

(1660), in answer to a libellous pamphlet on Charles I.

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.

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.

His case was further complicated by the libellous animosity of Beaton, archbishop of St Andrews (whose life he had saved in the "Clear-the-Causeway" incident), who was anxious to thwart his election to the archbishopric of St Andrews, now vacant by the death of Forman.

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.