ed that
the editorship of a paper, wholly destitute of merit except that which
Seymour brought to its aid, conferred upon himself a position which
rendered him superior to the rules of literary courtesy.

With all these pretensions, however, a Beckett was conscious of the
powerful assistance he was receiving from the artist; and we find him,
after his own peculiar fashion and more than questionable taste,
constantly alluding to the fact; describing him at various times as
"that highly gifted and popular artist, Mr. Seymour;" "our illustrious
artist Seymour;" and so on. In the preface to his second volume, he
indulges in the following flight of fancy, which will suffice to give us
an idea of the literary merits of the editor himself: "In this our
annual address," he says, "we cannot omit a puff for the rampant
Seymour, in whom the public continue to _see-more_ and more every time
he puts his pencil to the block for the illustration of our periodical."
This was the sort of stuff which passed for wit in 1832.[104] As for
Seymour himself, he was annoyed at these fulsome and foolish
compliments, and in a letter which he wrote to A Beckett after the
quarrel to be presently related, told him in the plainest terms that,
"the engraving, bad printing, and extravagant puffing of his designs
were calculated to do him more harm than good as an artist."

But artist and editor jogged on together in perfect good will until the
16th of August, 1834, when, for the first and only time, "Figaro in
London" made its appearance without any illustrations at all. The two
succeeding weekly issues contained each a single woodcut after Seymour's
drawing, but from that time until the end of the year, when A Beckett
himself retired from the proprietorship and disposed of his interest in
the concern, the paper was illustrated by Isaac Robert Cruikshank; this
change was due to the following circumstance.

A special feature of "Figaro in London" was its theatrical leader. A
Beckett had always taken an interest in dramatic matters, and was
himself author of some thirty plays, the very titles of which are now
forgotten. Not content with being proprietor and editor of a newspaper,
he was concerned at this time in another venture, being proprietor and
manager of a theatre in Tottenham Court Road, known at different times
under the various designations of the Tottenham Street or West London
Theatre, the Queen's, and latterly as the Prince of Wales' Theatr