ous, bombastic sort of spirit, to smash the aristocracy, to chaff
Alfred Bunn, to abuse low-class Jews, and to discuss the theatre. In
these agreeable vocations he hit the popular taste, and certainly
achieved a considerable circulation, which, Timbs declares, reached at
one time 70,000 copies. Small topical cuts, grandiloquently set down as
"magnificent caricatures," were well arranged as a rule, and things were
going well enough when editor and artist fell out; Robert Cruikshank
took Seymour's place--and a Beckett's monthly adulation of his old
"cartoonist's" work turned suddenly to contempt.

All this was meant more than half in fun; it was too violently personal
to be serious. Anyway, a Beckett declared in the paper that "it is not
true that Robert Seymour has gone out of his mind--he had none to go out
of," and Seymour retaliated heartily with a "sharp _cut_." In due course
Seymour resumed his place on "Figaro," and retained it to the end. In
December, 1834, a Beckett had handed over the paper, in the height of
its prosperity, to Henry Mayhew, who continued it for a time, and in
1839 it came to an end. Yet on so slender a basis as this has been
brought against a Beckett the cruel charge that it was these assaults
which did at a subsequent period drive Seymour out of his mind and led
to his unhappy suicide.

After "Figaro" died, and indeed partly during its continuance, a Beckett
launched out into an extraordinary series of extraordinary papers,
editing for other proprietors "The Wag," "The Evangelical Penny
Magazine," Dibdin's "Penny Trumpet," "The Thief" (under the engaging
frankness of whose title we may see the forerunner of "Public Opinion"),
"Poor Richard's Journal," and "The People's Penny Pictures;" while on
his own account he ran successively "The Terrific Penny Magazine," "The
Ghost," "The Lover," "The Gallery of Terrors," "The Figaro Monthly
Newspaper," "The Figaro Caricature Gallery," and "The Comic Magazine."
But in spite of all this ingenuity in title-devising, and of all this
dogged perseverance--though one can hardly call it seriousness--not one
of these journals obtained public support. As a matter of fact, they
were the journalistic wild oats of a born journalist and an exuberant
litterateur, who, as a youthful playwright and a budding barrister, now
had his hands quite full, yet--such was the fever of his industry--never
full enough.

His first contribution to _Punch_, according to W. H. Wills'