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. à 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 _soirée_ at the Duchess of Northumberland's town house, serve as occasions for indulging in splenetic abuse of what Mr. à 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 imagined 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, à 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 À 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."