woman, and whatever her spirit--for she had much of it, and showed it
grandly at need--was still a lady. Suffice it to say that 'John Bull'
was the most violent of the periodicals that attacked her, and that
Theodore Hook, no Puritan himself, was the principal writer in that
paper.

If you can imagine 'Punch' turned Conservative, incorporated in one
paper with the 'Morning Herald,' so that a column of news was printed
side by side with one of a jocular character, and these two together
devoted without principle to the support of a party, the attack of
Whiggism, and an unblushing detraction of the character of one of our
princesses, you can form some idea of what 'John Bull' was in those
days. There is, however, a difference: 'Punch' attacks public
characters, and ridicules public events; 'John Bull' dragged out the
most retired from their privacy, and attacked them with calumnies for
which, often, there was no foundation. Then, again, 'Punch' is not
nearly so bitter as was 'John Bull:' there is not in the 'London
Charivari' a determination to say everything that spite can invent
against any particular set or party; there is a good nature, still, in
master 'Punch.' It was quite the reverse in 'John Bull,' established for
one purpose, and devoted to that. Yet the wit in Theodore's paper does
not rise much higher than that of our modern laughing philosopher.

Of Hook's contributions the most remarkable was the 'Ramsbottom
Letters,' in which Mrs. Lavinia Dorothea Ramsbottom describes all the
_memory billions_ of her various tours at home and abroad, always, of
course, with more or less allusion to political affairs. The 'fun' of
these letters is very inferior to that of 'Jeames' or of the 'Snob
Papers,' and consists more in Malaprop absurdities and a wide range of
bad puns, than in any real wit displayed in them. Of the style of both,