however suffered severely at the hands of the engraver and
paper maker. An eccentricity of the publication perhaps deserves notice.
It professed to look with sovereign contempt upon advertisements, as
occupying a quantity of unnecessary space--considering, however, that
exception was made in favour of one particularly persevering hatter of
the period, we are driven to the conclusion that the projector's
contempt for a source of revenue which modern newspaper proprietors can
by no means afford to despise, was nearly akin to that expressed by the
fox after he had come to the melancholy conclusion that the grapes he
longed for were absolutely beyond his reach.

The new periodical assumed from the outset a position which cannot fail
to amuse the journalist and reader of the present day. It professed to
look down upon all other publications (with certain exceptions of
magnitude, whom the editor deemed it prudent to conciliate) with
supercilious contempt. The absurdity of these pretensions will strike
any one who turns over its forgotten pages, and compares his pretensions
with Mr. a Beckett's own share of the performance. The mode in which
this young gentleman's editorial duties were conducted, gathered from
extracts taken at random from the "Notices to Correspondents," were, to
say the least, peculiar: "A. B., who has written to us, is a fool of the
very lowest order. His communication is rejected." Poor Mr. Cox of Bath
is told he "is a rogue and a fool for sending us a letter without paying
the postage. If he wants his title page, let him order it of his
bookseller, when it will be got as a matter of course from our
publisher," and so on. The aristocracy are regarded with a disfavour
which must have given them serious disquietude. The "coming out" of the
daughter of the late Lord Byron, or a _soiree_ at the Duchess of
Northumberland's town house, serve as occasions for indulging in
splenetic abuse of what Mr. a Beckett was pleased to term "the beastly
aristocracy." Authors, even of position, were not spared by this young
Ishmael of the press, the respected Mrs. Trollope, for instance, being
unceremoniously referred to as "Mother Trollope." The only excuse of
course for this sort of thing is to be found in the fact that comic
journalism being then in its infancy, personal abuse was mistaken for
satire; while, so far as the bad taste of the editor is concerned,
allowance must be made for an inexperienced young man who imagin