Lie on, Duane, lie on for pay, And Cheetham, lie thou too, More ’gainst truth you cannot say Than truth can say ’gainst you, as a bold specimen of the editorial amenities of a century ago. But Coleman went far beyond the lie direct and countercheck quarrelsome. The American public has always refused to take at face value the epithets which editors exchange, and doubtless in Jefferson’s time it put a Pickwickian construction upon them. Referring to the most prominent Democratic editor, Coleman once quoted Milton’s line, “Squat like a toad at the ear of Eve,” adding: “I beg the devil’s pardon for comparing him in any shape with Duane.” Of Cheetham he said that he was so habituated to lying that given a choice of truth and mendacity he invariably preferred the latter, and on another occasion he listed twenty-five lies in a single article by “the President’s unlucky toad-eater.” Coleman thought nothing of referring to Dr. Peter Irving, head of the _Morning Chronicle_, as a “malevolent coxcomb,” and to his partner as “a pedant and blackguard.” Other journals fared no better. When the _Public Advertiser_, a new Clintonian organ, libeled the _Evening Post_, Coleman denounced its “villainy” and challenged the “vile reptiles” editing it to produce their evidence. The conductor of the Long Island _Star_ also fell afoul of the _Evening Post_. “This Kirk I have always despised as a flippant, conceited, shallow fellow,” wrote Coleman, “but I did not take him for so great a fool as his nonsense shows him to be, nor think him so black-hearted and malignant a calumniator.” In 1806 he termed Samuel H. Smith of the Washington _National Intelligencer_, the so-called “court journal” of Jefferson, “the little monkey.” Nine years later, when the era of good feeling was commencing, he prided himself upon his repression in speaking of the same able newspaper, in the columns of which Clay had been glad to appear: “I shall take no other notice of the charge in that profligate paper than to say I have long observed there is no misrepresentation too base, no violation of truth too palpable, not to be gladly adopted and circulated by that infamous organ.”