tter thanking him for sympathetic reviews, in
_Punch_--"Anent the 'Comic ----' and similar comicalities, I feel
exactly with you."

Of course, with the exception of the latter part of Jerrold's outburst,
wherein he was undoubtedly right, all this protest is exaggerated
nonsense--at least, as applied to a Beckett. One would think that
neither Jerrold nor Dickens could bear a burlesque in good
taste--Jerrold of all men! But it is just as likely that Jerrold was not
referring to a Beckett at all, but to Thackeray, whose "Miss
Tickletoby's Comic History" had already made its appearance in _Punch_,
and had been incontinently stopped. In any case, the public did not
agree with him, for both works are still popular favourites. Moreover,
he liked a Beckett too well to harm him in the mind of a common friend;
and he was unquestionably aware that the loftiness of a Beckett's aims
and character rendered him unassailable against a charge of irreverence
or lack of respect. Certain it is, at least, that when a Beckett died at
Boulogne Jerrold felt the blow so deeply that he gave up that town
thenceforward as a place of residence, nor would he ever visit it again.

It was at the early age of thirty-eight that a Beckett was appointed
police-magistrate, chiefly owing to the masterly report he drew up as
Poor-Law Commissioner in respect to the notorious Andover Union
Workhouse scandals[35]--"one of the best," said the Home Secretary,
"ever presented to Parliament." The appointment was much discussed, for
the general feeling had been educated in the views of Lord Selborne, who
asserted that no "person" connected with the Press nor any "gentleman in
the wine trade" could be permitted to attain to such an honour as the
Bench--an absurdity which has long since been dismissed. On one
occasion, it is said, when a Beckett lived at No. 10, Hyde Park Gate
South, Kensington Gore, he was instructed to hold himself in readiness,
as magistrate, to answer a summons to read the Riot Act in Hyde Park to
the unruly mob whose methods of protest against a popular grievance
constituted the "Beer Bill Riots" of 1855. That summons never came,
luckily for him; for later in the day he discovered, to his dismay,
that his careful and solicitous wife, with greater respect for her
husband's skin than for the needs of Government, Police, and Proletariat
combined, had gone out early, after securely locking the unconscious
magistrate in his library, and had prudently