“The North Street Gazette is a journal written for the rich by the poor.
“The North Street Gazette will be printed and published by the proprietors at and from 6 North Street, Smith Square, Westminster, London, S.W. This, the first number, appears upon the date which it bears; subsequent numbers will appear whenever the proprietors are in possession of sufficient matter, literary and artistic, or even advertisement, to fill its columns. No price is attached to the sheet, but a subscription of one guinea will entitle a subscriber to receive no less than twenty copies, each differing from the last. These twenty copies delivered, none will be sent to any subscriber until his next subscription is paid.
“The North Street Gazette will fearlessly expose all public scandals save those which happen to be lucrative to the proprietors, or whose exposure might in some way damage them or their more intimate friends.
“The services of a competent artist have been provisionally acquired, a staff of prose writers, limited but efficient, is at the service of the paper; three poets of fecundity and skill have also been hired. Specimens of all three classes of work will be discovered in this initial number.
“A speciality of the newspaper will be that the Russian correspondence will be written in Russian, and the English in English.
“All communications (which should be written on one side of the paper only) will be received with consideration, and those accompanied by stamps will be confiscated.”
Then followed a leading article composed entirely of clichés; a long article advocating votes for monkeys, written by Belloc and afterwards republished by him; “Society Notes”; a “City Letter”; and a poem by Belloc, called “East and West,” parts of which, but not the whole of it, are to be found in his book The Four Men.
The version I print here is the original form of this spirited lyric:
“EAST AND WEST
“The dog is a faithful, intelligent friend,