Among the rarer works published in 1840, to which John Leech contributed the benefit of his assistance, may be mentioned a publication, entitled "The London Magazine, Charivari, and Courier des Dames" (Simpkin, Marshall & Co.), in which we find some portraits and other work altogether out of the range of his usual style of illustration. The tone of this publication was personal in the extreme. Charles Dickens had produced (among other publications) his "Pickwick Papers," "Oliver Twist," "Nicholas Nickleby," and at this time was engaged on the most touching and pathetic of his stories, "The Old Curiosity Shop," which was, however, so little appreciated by the editor of this scurrilous publication, that we find him perpetrating the following sorry libel on the writer and three of his contemporaries: "To cheesemongers and others! Ready for delivery, at a halfpenny per pound, forty tons of foundered literature; viz., Mrs. Trollope's 'Unsatis-factory Boy,'[131] 'Master Humphrey's Clock' (refer to the second meaning in 'Johnson's Dictionary': 'an unsightly crawling thing'!), Captain Marryat's 'Alas, Poor Jack'! and _Turpis_ Ainsworth's 'Guy _Fox_':-- 'An animal cunning, unsavoury, small, That will dirty your hands if you touch it at all.'" So little merit had this critical periodical itself, that some rare etchings by Hablot Knight Browne and Leech to a novel entitled "The Diurnal Revolutions of David Diddledoff," which appeared in its pages, failed to keep the dreary serial alive, and a quarrel ensuing between the proprietors and himself, Browne was dismissed and Leech supplied his place. Leech's caricature of Mulready's postage envelope, already mentioned, appears to have led to others, and among them one by "Phiz," a circumstance which is referred to in the following attack: "Phiz has found a lower deep in the lowest depths of meanness. When Leech's admirable caricature of Mulready's postage envelope was pirated by every tenth-rate _sketcher_, Phiz steps in to complete the work of injustice, and advertises his caricature of the same subject at _sixpence_, thus both borrowing the design and underselling the artist upon whose brains he is preying as the fly upon the elk's. Well might Leech exclaim, 'Et tu, Brute!' (and you, you brute!) Leech is a genuine artist, while Phiz is only a bad engraver." By way of answer to this vulgar abuse, Phiz almost immediately afterwards produced his admirable illustration of _Quilp and the Dog_, in No. 18 of "Master Humphrey's Clock."