tory to his morbid sensibility and
affected squeamishness. We are free to confess that two things surprise
us in this business; the first, that anything which we have thought
worth giving to the public should have been mistaken for Mr. Hook's;
and, secondly that _such a person_ as Mr. Hook should think himself
disgraced by a connection with _John Bull_."

For sheer impudence this, perhaps, may be admitted to "defy
competition"; but in point of tact and delicacy of finish it falls
infinitely short of a subsequent notice, a perfect gem of its class,
added by way of clenching the denial:--

"We have received Mr. Theodore Hook's second letter. We are ready to
confess that we may have appeared to treat him too unceremoniously, but
we will put it to his own feelings whether the terms of his denial were
not, in some degree, calculated to produce a little asperity on our
part. We shall never be ashamed, however, to do justice, and we readily
declare that we meant no kind of imputation on Mr. Hook's personal
character."

The ruse answered for awhile, and the paper went on with unabated
audacity.

The death of the Queen, in the summer of 1821, produced a decided
alteration in the tone and temper of the paper. In point of fact its
occupation was now gone. The main, if not the sole, object of its
establishment had been brought about by other and unforeseen events. The
combination it had laboured so energetically to thwart was now dissolved
by a higher and resistless agency. Still, it is not to be supposed that
a machine which brought in a profit of something above L4,000 per annum,
half of which fell to the share of Hook, was to be lightly thrown up,
simply because its original purpose was attained. The dissolution of the
"League" did not exist then as a precedent. The Queen was no longer to
be feared; but there were Whigs and Radicals enough to be held in check,
and, above all, there was a handsome income to be realised.

"Latterly Hook's desultory nature made him wander from the _Bull_,
which might have furnished the thoughtless and heartless man of pleasure
with an income for life. The paper naturally lost sap and vigour, at
once declined in sale, and sank into a mere respectable club-house and
party organ." "Mr. Hook," says Barham, "received to the day of his death
a fixed salary, but the proprietorship had long since passed into other
hands."

CHAPTER X.

FLEET STREET TRIBUTARIES.

Dr. Johnson in Bolt Cour