M. H. Spielmann

H. P. Grattan—W. H. Wills—R. B. Postans—Bread-Tax and Tooth-Tax—G. Hodder—G. H. B. Rodwell—Douglas Jerrold—His Caustic Wit—The "Q Papers"—A Statesman pour rire—His Sympathy with the Poor and Oppressed—Wins for Punch his Political Influence—Ill-health—"Punch's Letters"—The "Jenkins" and "Pecksniff" Papers—"Mrs. Caudle"—Jerrold's Love of Children, common to the Staff—He Silences his Fellow-wits—And is Routed by a Barmaid—He sends his Love to the Staff—And they prove theirs.

The remaining contributors to the first number were Joseph Allen, H. P. Grattan, and W. H. Wills. The contribution of the first-named has already been indicated. H. P. "Grattan"—whose real name was Plunkett, and whose occasional pseudonym was the familiar "Fusbos"—worked well for the first numbers and for the Almanac. He was a witty versifier and clever dramatist, but he soon tired of the paper and directed his energies into other channels. W. H. Wills—"Harry Wills" he was always called—was a more important and a more faithful contributor. His first verses were "A Quarter-day Cogitation" (p. 5), and for some time he was the regular dramatic critic of Punch, in which a considerable amount of space was accorded to the review of amusements of all kinds, and not a little to Charles Kean and his histrionic deficiencies. Besides "Punch's Theatre," he wrote paragraphs, verses, and criticisms innumerable, including the series of "Punch's Natural History of Courtship," illustrated by the pencils of Sir John Gilbert, Newman, and Gavarni; "Punch's Comic Mythology," "Punch's Information for the People," as well as "Punch's Valentines," and lively skits like "The Burst Boiler and the Broken Heart," and the verses in praise of pawnbrokers, "The Uncles of England." After helping the Almanac for 1846, his Punch connection was interrupted for a period through his being called to Edinburgh to edit "Chambers's Journal;" but on his return to London two years later he resumed his position in a modified form. He became secretary to Charles Dickens, who was then editing the "Daily News," as well as his assistant editor on "Household Words," and subsequently on "All the Year Round," so that little time was left him for humorous composition—though he certainly found leisure to issue "The Family Joe Miller." When he was in Edinburgh he married Robert Chambers' sister—a lady possessed of true Scottish wit, some of whose pithy remarks are still remembered, such as "The ladies who agitate for women's rights are generally men's lefts."

Of the other two writers who aided in the founding of Punch—Postans and George Hodder—there is little to say. The first-named, indeed, has already been sufficiently dealt with, but it may be added that his last contribution was his verses—"A Contribution by Cobden"—on the subject of the removal by Sir Robert Peel of the tax on artificial teeth. Postans saw his chance, for the Repeal of the Corn Laws was already being agitated, and the tooth-tax troubled his mouth less than the tax on bread. His final verse ran—

Besides his ambassadorial assistance, and in spite of his presence at the Punch Club, Hodder was not of much account on the paper, either in its formation or its literary production. He was, however, related to Punch by marriage, being the husband of Henning's beautiful daughter, the niece of Kenny Meadows' wife. His last appearances in its pages were in 1843, when four contributions (including "Punch's Phrenology") came from him; and then he resumed his usual work of journalist, became Thackeray's secretary for a time, and died through the upsetting of a coach in Richmond Park.

Passing by Leman Rede and G. H. B. Rodwell (composer, playwright, and ballad writer), neither of whom, so far as I have been able to ascertain, has left any appreciable trace on Punch, we come to the man to whom, more than to anyone else, the paper owed the enormous political influence it once enjoyed, and to whom it is indebted for much of the literary reputation it still retains—Douglas Jerrold.

If he was not exactly the wit of his day—for his mind lacked the wider sympathy, the greater grasp, and gentler refinement of Sydney Smith's—he was certainly the most brilliant professional humorist of his generation—"a wit, if not first, in the very first line." Something of the bitterness and savagery of Gillray's rampant pleasantry afflicted his vis comica; and when a happy thought, however unhappy and painful for the hearer, came to the tip of his tongue, he could no more resist slipping it off than he could wilfully have done him injury.

Mark Lemon used to say, "Punch and I were made for each other." With far more reason could that notion of reciprocity be applied to Jerrold. No man ever gained so much from the paper in which he worked. He simply frolicked in its pages, that fitted his talent as accurately as his genius suited the times in which he lived. It is doubtful whether he would make the same mark in it were he alive to-day; he would have to seek another publication and another public, or else adopt an utter change of tone. But in those lively times, when, obeying the summons addressed to him in Boulogne, he sent his first political paper—beginning characteristically with the introduction of Peel, in time for the second number—he gave his powers full play. And his sparkle was the brighter for its setting and its surroundings. His wit was for the most part caustic and saturnine, and in no other journal could it have so completely identified itself with the ensemble of tone. Without Punch, Jerrold would certainly not have been so distinguished a man; yet he somewhere says in one of his works, with a touch of ingratitude: "If you'd pass for somebody, you must sneer at a play, but idolise Punch"—as though this were the height of priggishness. He was a keen judge of things, and might have held that view; but it was hardly for him, of all men, to publish it.

It is not surprising that, with the enormous reputation for wit which he enjoyed, and up to which he lived with such triumphant ease, all the smarter orphan-jokes of the day were fathered upon him. But there was a ring about the true Jerroldian humour which the connoisseur could hardly mistake. And the public soon became good enough judges of it too, studying it regularly in Punch, and refusing for the most part to be led away to look for it in the other journals which Jerrold edited, with but indifferent success so far as their circulation went. Although his fame was already established as a dramatist before Punch was born, I doubt, without Punch, he would ever have earned the reputation in pure literature which his "Q Papers" helped to found.

It was with these "Q Papers" that he began, and he threw into them some of his strongest and most withering writing, and oftentimes some of his weakest sense. With his soft heart melting for the poor, and his fiery hatred of oppression warping his better judgment, he was led into that unreasoning attack upon property and authority to which Thackeray deprecatingly alludes. Because the poor are unhappy, according to his philosophy, therefore are the rich, most of them, their direct oppressors, and ruling bodies, tyrants. Fiercely upright and aggressively impulsive in his championship of the lowly, he was anything but sound and thorough in his premisses; and had he the power he might have wielded later, his defects as a political economist would infallibly have brought about disaster. "His Radicalism," his son has told us, "was that of a humorist"—that is to say, all his power and all his wit as a writer (and they had few, if any, equals in the press), all his genius for invective and ridicule, and all his commanding influence with the public, were directed against Society and the powers that were, simply from a playful sense of humour! Luckily, the evil, or at least the danger, thus found a corrective for itself; for although Jerrold's power, and with it Punch's, grew with amazing rapidity among all classes, his tirades were felt to come more from the humorist's heart than from the statesman's brain. It is thus easy to draw a comparison between Jerrold and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, of whom Carlyle says: "He is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks as a humorist, he feels, imagines, acts as a humorist. Sport is the element in which his nature lives and works.... A Titan in his sport, as in his earnestness, he oversteps all bounds, and riots without law or measure." The words might almost have been written of Jerrold himself. But, for all that, he was generally recognised as a leading champion of the people's rights and reformer of their wrongs; and to this passionate earnestness, to this keen wit and shrewd sincerity of the unconsciously special pleader, Punch owed most of the early notice he obtained, and much of his influence in the worlds of politics and Society.

These papers, then, of which the first was "Punch and Peel" (July 24th, 1841), were, in fact, political leading-articles, satirical, ironical, bitter, and more often demagogic than humorous, though of wit and humour both there was a generous undercurrent. Punch showed himself at once a fighting man who meant to be in the thick of the fray, a politician as impulsive as Macaulay; and though Jerrold did not begin to sign his articles until the ninth week (which has given grounds to some writers to assert that "Peel Regularly Called In" was the first of his contributions), he soon succeeded in setting up "Q" as a personality every bit as important and influential amongst his readers as Punch himself. The Court, the Church, the Political and Social arena, he included them all in his comprehensive gaze, and not an injustice, a sham, an affectation, or a blunder—or what he happened to regard as such—but came in for exposure and castigation. It was fortunate for him and for Punch, no doubt, that he was "a humorist;" for his own blunders and misjudgments were regarded with the more indulgence for it, or were condoned as the excusable excesses of a chartered jester running playfully amok. But it must not be imagined that though a humorist he was not desperately sincere. His own early struggles, his ghastly experience, as he ever thought it, when as a midshipman in the Navy he saw how authority had to be enforced by flogging, and witnessed all the revolting horrors of the cockpit during an engagement, had imparted intense earnestness to his mind; and he focussed all his brilliancy on the opportunity Punch afforded of tilting at the windmills in the plain. The fact seems to be that Jerrold's heart, and sometimes his logic and his judgment as well, were a good deal of a woman's; distinguished by every estimable and admirable quality, but with little statesmanlike perspicuity and moderation. Such may truly be said of those early "Q Papers," by which, nevertheless, he was able to effect much, then and thereafter, greatly to the good of the people, yet often wrought some of that intolerance and injustice which he was too ready to ascribe to others.

It was he, more than anyone else, who forced on Punch that admixture of Radicalism with his Whiggery which did not wear off for the first years of his life, and which was often enough preached with that picturesqueness of expression which we nowadays would smile at as "high-falutin." But the lofty ideas of the writer carried off this fault of style. His creed was simple and clear: Cant was devilish and Samaritanism godly; to him hypocrisy was the blackest of the vices, and kindness the sum of all the virtues. It mattered little that that kindness misplaced might bring a train of evils in its place; sympathy was the one thing wanted; the quinine of stern justice (except against the great and rich) should ever be watered down with mercy. It was, in fact, the religion less of the practical politician and true reformer, than of the worthy, upright, kind-hearted, unthinking Christian. His very fearlessness made men fear him, as his motives and ability compelled their respect; and the majority, who cared less for political philosophy than for political fervour, applauded him blindfold, and in due time accorded to Punch a place in their esteem second only to that enjoyed by the "Times." Of course, "bitterness" was expected in the satirical papers of that day; and it is not pretended that Jerrold was ever so unreasonable or so anarchical in the pages of Punch as William Brough revealed himself in the brilliant attacks on the propertied classes in which he indulged in his Liverpool journal. He lost, of course, no opportunity of assailing the Duke of Wellington, and Louis Philippe, and the "Morning Post" (articles in which he attacked the snobs of England before Thackeray did), and other of Punch's permanent butts; but his chief merit lies in his having set up the hereditary sins of Society as targets, and shot his barbed darts into them with unerring accuracy of aim. Of his bitterness it was said that it was "healthy—healthy as bark," just as Thackeray—was it not?—had previously said of his own writings in "Britannia."

It was not till a year afterwards (1842) that he began his "Punch's Letters to his Son." They were tender enough, and show little evidence that they were written in weakness and in pain. His health, indeed, gave him periods of agony of a rheumatic character, pain in his hands so great that at one time he could not write, and at another his whole racked body practically paralysed, until a "cure" at Malvern gave him back control of it. On another occasion, but that was in later years, when he was asked how he was, he replied, "As one that is waiting and is waited for," and he often wrote, said his son, when the movement of the pen was fierce pain to him. We may see in this physical torment, perhaps, the mainspring of much of his caustic humour. Mr. Cooper, R.A., would ascribe to over-indulgence much of Jerrold's suffering. "His countenance was open and bright (when sober!), and showed nothing of that satirical bitterness for which he was so eminent.... In accordance with the fashion of the time the man who could not drink his bottle and remain sober, drank his bottle and got drunk." But the Academician, like most teetotalers, would often see drunkenness where Jerrold saw merely drink, and probably knew nothing of the latter's own feelings towards undue indulgence. "Habitual intoxication," wrote Jerrold himself, "is the epitome of every crime;" and elsewhere, "The bottle is the devil's crucible." Yet it must be admitted that he was not averse to what in his day was called "true conviviality," which, as I have heard it remarked, never yet made a man a drunkard, though it may sometimes have made him drunk. "If Bacchus often leads men into quagmires deep as his vats, let us yet do him this justice—he sometimes leads them out. Ask your opponent to take another glass of wine." And did not Thomas Hood suggest, when he was told that by his love of wine he was shortening his days, that anyhow he was lengthening his nights?

What may be called the "Jenkins" and the "Pecksniff" papers belong to the same year. The former were directed against the "Morning Post," which, with other loyal journals, in those days adopted a tone towards Court and Society hardly in keeping with modern ideas of manly independence, and of course its politics were to match. Thackeray and À Beckett joined later in the sport. But Jerrold, while believing in Thackeray's hatred of the snob, more than suspected him of being a snob himself; and Thackeray felt not less convinced of the hollowness of Jerrold's "stalwartness." "Thackeray had neither love nor respect for Jerrold's democracy," Vizetelly tells us. "I remember him mentioning to me his having noticed at the Earl of Carlisle's a presentation copy of one of Jerrold's books, the inscription in which ran: 'To the Right Honourable the Earl of Carlisle, K.G., K.C.B., etc. etc.' 'Ah!' said Thackeray, 'this is the sort of style in which your rigid, uncompromising Radical always toadies the great.'" And yet both men were honest toady-haters to the core. It was this very hatred of snobbism which inspired Jerrold with his cutting retort to Samuel Warren, author of "Ten Thousand a Year," who complained that at some aristocratic house at which he had recently dined he could positively get no fish. "I suppose," said Jerrold, "they had eaten it all upstairs!"[37]

The "Pecksniff" papers, as already stated, very nearly involved Punch in its first libel action. The object of its criticism was, of course, Samuel Carter Hall, who, tradition says, was the origin of Dickens's immortal conception. This creation—the symbol of cant and hypocrisy—was after Jerrold's own heart, and, thinking less of charity this time than of justice, he smote the luckless editor of the "Art Journal" hip and thigh, and revelled in his attacks. Hall's articles on the industrial art of England were supposed to be dictated more by the complacency and generosity of manufacturers than by the artistic excellence of their wares. Sometimes Jerrold would use the image of "Pecksniff" for other and more serious purposes than the baiting of Mr. Hall and his little ways, as when, in 1844, he made this biting onslaught on the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel:

"We have heard that Mr. Charles Dickens is about to apply to the Court of Chancery for an injunction to prevent Sir Robert Peel continuing any longer to personate, in his character of Premier, the character of Mr. Pecksniff, as delineated in Martin Chuzzlewit, that character being copyright. We hope this rumour is unfounded, as the injunction would certainly be refused. Sir Robert Peel is in a condition to prove that the part in question has been enacted by him for a long series of years, and was so long before any of Mr. Dickens's works appeared; in short, that he, Sir Robert Peel, is the original Pecksniff."

The year 1843 was a notable one in Punch's calendar, for in it Jerrold struck that note of sympathy and tenderness that was almost immediately to culminate in Hood's tragic poem. "The Story of a Feather" was begun, and was the greatest success the paper had scored up to that time, with the exception of the first Almanac. Dickens, who watched for it and read it as it came out, wrote privately to him that it was "a beautiful book," and his verdict was endorsed by the ever-increasing circle of Punch's readers. "Our Honeymoon" was Jerrold's last series of the year—a year which drew from him plenty of outside work. He edited Mr. Herbert Ingram's admirable but short-lived "Illuminated Magazine," and wrote for it the "Chronicles of Clovernook" and the "Chronicles of a Goosequill." It is astonishing, in looking back at Jerrold's remarkable work at this period, to think that the public reads his books no more, and prefers to ruin its literary taste on fifth-rate romances rather than on the virile novels of a recent past.

For a little while nothing of special note, though still a great mass of work, came from Jerrold's pen, until 1845, when, as prophesied by Hal Baylis (see p. 97), "Mrs. Caudle" burst upon the town. In common with a few other things achieved by Punch, it created a national furore, and set the whole country laughing and talking. Other nations soon took up the conversation and the laughter, and "Mrs. Caudle" passed into the popular mind and took a permanent place in the language in an incredibly short space of time.

"Some years after I had ceased my connection with Punch," says Landells in one of his autobiographical papers now in my hands, "I met Douglas Jerrold at the corner of Essex Street in the Strand. It was the time when the first number of the 'Caudle Curtain Lectures' appeared. In the course of conversation I remarked that I did not read Punch regularly, but I had by chance perused the opening chapter of his new subject, and I thought, if he followed up the series in the spirit he had begun, they would be the most popular that have ever appeared in its pages. He laughed heartily and replied—'It just shows what stuff the people will swallow. I could write such rubbish as that by the yard;' and he added, 'I have before said, the public will always pay to be amused, but they will never pay to be instructed.' The Caudle Lectures did more than any series of papers for the universal popularity of Punch, and there is no doubt but they added greatly to Jerrold's reputation, although he always affected not to think so."

The origin of Mrs. Caudle—one of those women interminably loquacious and militantly gloomy under fancied marital oppression, who (as Jerrold said of another) "wouldn't allow that there was a bright side to the moon"—was the result of no mental effort. Henry Mayhew's son has said that the character was evolved from the relations of Mr. and Mrs. Landells; but to anyone conversant with them the suggestion is palpably absurd. Moreover, Jerrold, himself a good authority, one would have thought, declared that she was "the result of no thought;" she was merely "wafted into his brain." The reason of the immediate success of these "Curtain Lectures" was said to be that every woman in the land recognised in the lecturer a gratifying resemblance to someone in her own circle. It was primarily, no doubt, the intime character of the papers, rather than their inherent humour, that tickled the public taste—though at the same time it gave some offence. A reminiscence of a literary protÉgÉe of Jerrold's—Mrs. Newton Crosland—seems to bear this out. In company with her mother, she was dining at Jerrold's house, when, "towards the close of the meal, a packet arrived—proofs, I fancy; at any rate, Douglas Jerrold opened a letter which visibly disturbed him. 'Hark at this,' he said, after a little while; and he then proceeded to read a really pathetic though not very well expressed letter from an aggrieved matron, who appealed to him to discontinue or modify the Caudle Lectures. She declared they were bringing discord into families and making a multitude of women miserable."

But they made a greater multitude of men merry, and Punch proceeded with them—indeed, he continued so long that his rivals protested loudly, as well they might in their own interests. They published engravings of handsome sarcophagi, and gave similar unmistakable hints that they considered the interment of Mrs. Caudle's corpse a long time overdue; while "Joe Miller the Younger" represented him as "The Modern Paganini playing on One String: 'Caudle—without variations.'" But Jerrold, who had lately moved from Regent's Park to his house, West Lodge, at Putney Lower Common, continued there to write Caudle Lectures "by the yard"—alternating the locale, according to Mark Lemon, with a tavern in Bouverie Street. And he laughed to see how his papers were translated into nearly every Continental language, and were transferred to the stage both in London and the provinces. Mrs. Keeley made a life-like Mrs. Caudle at the Lyceum—only perhaps a little too fresh and charming; the character in the provinces being often undertaken by male impersonators, such, for example, as Mr. Warren. John Leech executed upon stone a couple of admirable portraits of the conjugal pair, which were sold, coloured, for a shilling; but they were soon pirated and hawked about the streets, and the unprincipled conductors of "The Penny Satirist," and similar abominations, traded largely not only on the identity of the Caudles, but on the words of Mrs. Caudle herself—so freely that legal steps had to be taken to stop the nuisance. The latest edition of this jeu d'esprit is that which has been illustrated by Charles Keene, and it can hardly be doubted that in his drawings he often touches the high-water mark of his artistic execution.

In due time Douglas Jerrold, as in duty bound, made the amende honorable to the sex he had maligned. He was invited to take the chair at a great public meeting held at Birmingham in his honour, when the whole audience rose at him. He was asked to speak without fear, "as there was no Mrs. Caudle in Birmingham." He responded that he "did not believe that there was a Mrs. Caudle in the whole world," and the gracefulness of his reference set him at peace with womankind once more. In point of fact, he was no more pleased, artistically, with the success of Mrs. Caudle among his books than he was pleased with the position of "Black-eyed Susan" among his plays, as he was well aware that he had done much better work in both branches. But for Punch's sake he was delighted. So after the death of Mrs. Caudle, which in decency could no longer be delayed, Jerrold attempted to carry on the idea by marrying the widower to the lady of whom his wife had been so jealous; so that Mr. Caudle—his head turned by his new-born liberty—might, in the "Breakfast Talk" levelled at his second spouse, avenge the oppression he had suffered from his first. But the experiment, which took place in the Almanac of the following year, fell flat, and Mr. and Mrs. Caudle, too, dropped out of Mr. Punch's doll-box for good and all.

Then followed, in 1846, "Punch's Complete Letter-writer," which in consequence of the odium incurred a short time before by Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary,[38] by the opening of certain letters while they were passing through the post, Jerrold sarcastically dedicated to the heckled baronet. He did this on the ground that Sir James, having the whole run of the Post Office and the fingering of all the letters, must therefore possess "a most refined, most exquisite taste for the graces of epistolary composition," and could thoroughly appreciate them. This was another version of Hood's lines—

and is the pattern on which Mr. Whistler's effort was founded—that the mere company of pictures can impart no feeling or knowledge of art, else the policeman in the National Gallery must be the best of critics. But at this time better work of Jerrold's, "St. Giles's and St. James's," was appearing in his "Shilling Magazine" (newly started by Bradbury and Evans), as well as in the "Daily News," under the title of the "Hedgehog Papers;" while "Time Works Wonders" raised his reputation higher than ever upon the stage.

In the same year appeared the commencement of the series "Mrs. Bibs' Baby"—but it was not a success, and was entirely thrown into the shade, as it appeared, by Thackeray's first triumph, the "Snob Papers." The chief charm about "Mrs. Bibs' Baby" is that it was the outcome of Jerrold's passionate love of children. This delightful trait in Jerrold's character—as in Steele's, Fielding's, Goldsmith's, and Dickens's—has been common to many of the Punch Staff, as we know in their lives and have seen in their works. We all know how Thackeray never saw a boy without wanting to tip him—a practical form of sympathy which found great approval. Leech loved all children, even the terrible ones, and makes us feel it in his drawings. Mr. du Maurier adores the nice and the pretty ones, and even has a fatherly sort of pity for the stupid and the ugly. Mr. Harry Furniss's "Romps" reflects his keen delight in young people, the wilder the better. Shirley Brooks loved to read the "Jabberwock" to them, and Sir John Tenniel, like his old chief, Mark Lemon, loved them for their childhood's sake—or he would never have been able to give us "Alice in Wonderland." Of course, there may be others on the Staff who have no particularly pronounced feeling in this direction; but Jerrold would often go out of his way to introduce babies into his serious articles. He speaks somewhere of something "sweeter than the sweetest baby"—and once said that "children are earthly idols that hold us from the stars." So he began "Mrs. Bibs' Baby," and felt humiliated and disappointed when the public showed no glimmer of interest in it, and he was soon induced by his own good sense and the editorial hint to desert his latest offspring.

Then came "The Female Robinson Crusoe," and the last (modified) success, "Twelve Fireside Saints;" but outside undertakings were almost monopolising his attention. His "Weekly Newspaper," founded on the strength of his "Q Papers," had been born and was already dead. His powerful novel "A Man Made of Money" made his next unqualified success; then in 1850 he became attached to the "Examiner," and two years later "Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper" brought him an editorship and a thousand pounds a year—and he knew at last, and for the first time, the meaning of freedom from care. He became, moreover, independent of the publishers of Punch, to whom he was pecuniarily indebted, although they had more than once raised his salary (once in order to enable him to dispense with working for the "Pictorial Times"); but his indebtedness he felt as a tie, which was none the less irksome that it was a golden fetter which bound him to his friends. Still, to the end he sent in his satires, couplets, and epigrams—stinging, brilliant, and original—jokes and sarcasms by the score, but extremely few puns.

Sometimes, reviving the memories of his early trade, he would enter the compositors' room, and, while waiting for a proof, would seize a "stick," set up some concluding lines or a fresh paragraph in type, and even make his own corrections in proof, almost driving the "reader" out of his mind, until he learned how the corrections and additions had been effected.

That Jerrold's wit ran in a higher groove than mere verbal quips and cranks is proved by the retorts and epigrams that have been preserved and ticketed in cases like a collection of brilliant butterflies. When one March or April he tumbled backwards into water where, but for the unseasonable weather, no water ought to have been, he suggested that the accident was "owing to the backward spring;" reminding us of that similar witticism of Henry Compton's, when fine hot weather followed suddenly on March snows—"We have jumped from winter to summer without a spring." His reply was characteristic to the poet HÉraud's enquiry as to whether he had seen his "Descent into Hell" (then newly published)—"I wish to Heaven I had;" together with his well-known retort to Albert Smith, who, before he left the paper, protested coaxingly against Jerrold's merciless chaff, adding, "After all, you know, we row in the same boat." "True," answered Jerrold, quick as thought, "but not with the same skulls."

But he did not always come off scot-free; and, like many a wit whose tongue is feared, he could be silenced by a well-directed thrust which, for want of practice and experience in defence, he knew not how to parry. Mr. Charles Williams tells me the story, recounted to him by Thackeray, of how, when one wet night they were all at a little oyster-shop then facing the Strand Theatre, the barmaid Jane, thoroughly out of humour at Jerrold's chaff, slapped down before the little man the liquor he had ordered, with the words, "There's your grog and take care you don't drown yourself;" with the effect of damping his spirits for the rest of the night. When Alfred Bunn retaliated with "A Word with Punch,"[39] Jerrold made no reply, to the astonished delight of the rival press. No man had greater courage than he; but he probably found that he had nothing more to say, seeing that from week to week for years past he had written against Bunn all he knew or could think of. And when Shirley Brooks struck at him in "The Man in the Moon" in the course of a mock election-address beginning—"I hate the humbug of the 'wrongs of the poor man' class of writing when any sneaking rascal is found poaching and punished for it"—Jerrold held his peace, and in due time voted to have the damaging assailant invited to join Punch's Staff. Mrs. Landells, without straining their friendship, called him "the little wasp" to his face; but, as Leigh Hunt more justly said, if he had the sting of the bee, he also had the honey. When Jerrold said in his wife's presence that a man ought to be able to change a spouse like a bank-note—change one of forty for two of twenty—he indulged in kindly chaff which she well understood and could appreciate; and when, on the occasion of a party at their house, he replied to a question as to who was dancing with his wife, "Oh, a member of the Humane Society, I suppose," she had no objection to Leech making it into a picture for Punch's pages. When Jerrold said anything witty he would always laugh frankly and unreservedly at it, and, like Dickens, he would burst out laughing as he wrote, when he struck upon a comic idea for Punch.

The report that Mark Lemon said of Douglas Jerrold that "he was doubtless considered caustic because he blackened every character he touched" is probably apocryphal—though Jerrold's occasional treatment of Lemon might perhaps have justified some sort of retaliation from his genial Editor. Still, it was Jerrold's firm belief, as he declared to Mr. Sidney Cooper, R.A., that he had never in his life said or written a bitter thing of anyone who did not deserve it. But when he was on his death-bed, the day before he died, he sent a last affectionate message to his old comrades at the Table: "Tell the dear boys that if I've ever wounded any of them, I've always loved them." Horace Mayhew was with him when he passed away, and thence from the bedside brought the dead man's love to them as a token to wipe out the sting of words which, if they had not been forgotten, had been forgiven long ago.

After 1848 Jerrold wrote less and less for Punch; but until 1857, the year of his death, he faithfully attended at the Table, and exerted himself in Punch's behalf. And when he died—the greatest blow Punch had hitherto suffered by death (for Dr. Maginn was never on the Staff)—Henry Mayhew (his son-in-law), Thackeray, Horace Mayhew, Mark Lemon, and W. Bradbury were his pall-bearers, and Leech, Shirley Brooks, Tom Taylor, John Oxenford, Percival Leigh, James Hannay, Landells, Kenny Meadows, Albert Smith, and John Tenniel attended at his graveside. Dickens took a prominent part in raising a fund for the benefit of the widow, and with Thackeray and Dr. W. H. (now Sir William) Russell gave readings, while Dickens' Amateurs made a public appearance, and T. P. Cooke returned to the stage for the occasion—with a result amounting to £2,000. Tom Taylor's feeling address, which was spoken at the Adelphi Theatre by Albert Smith, between whom and Jerrold a kindlier feeling had latterly sprung up, concluded thus:—