most be gathered from his pictures in
_Punch_, in which the shadow of none of his former troubles is ever
reflected: nothing but his "facile execution and singular subtlety of
fancy." Indeed, "Cheerful Charley," as he was known to his intimates,
became, as he himself declared, one of the luckiest and happiest of
men--fully appreciated for his art and his own delightful qualities by
troops of admiring friends. It was his extraordinary power of realising
an abstract thought and crystallising it at once into a happy pictorial
fancy that set him on a pedestal, a poet among his colleagues--those
colleagues who, when he died, lamented "the loss of a comrade of
invaluable skill, and the death of one of the kindliest and gentlest of
our associates, the power of whose hand was equalled by the goodness of
his heart."

But Bennett left his family in sad straits, and, on Shirley Brooks's
initiative, the "_Punch_ men" at once set about devising a means to help
them. The result was the theatrical performance referred to on pp.
132-134. The Moray Minstrels wound up this famous entertainment, and
Shirley Brooks delivered a touching address of his own writing.

Besides T. W. Woods (who made four drawings), Prehn (two), Lowe (six),
and Hays (three), Mr. W. S. Gilbert swelled the list of contributors in
this same year (1865). His work, consisting of fifteen small cuts signed
with the now familiar "Bab," and designed to illustrate the rhymes they
accompany, was lost to _Punch_ by the indisposition for compromise
displayed by contributor and Editor alike. "I sent three or four
drawings," Mr. Gilbert informs me, "and half-a dozen short articles; but
I was told by Mark Lemon, or rather a message reached me from him, that
he would insert nothing more of mine unless I left 'Fun,' with which I
was connected. This I declined to do unless he would take me on the
regular staff of _Punch_. This _he_ declined to do, and so the matter
ended. I had previously offered 'The Yarn of the Nancy Bell' (the first
of the Bab Ballads) to _Punch_, but Mark Lemon declined it on the ground
that it was 'too cannibalistic for his readers.'" So Mr. Gilbert knew
_Punch_ no more; and it is commonly related that he enjoys nothing more
than an occasional good-humoured fling at the journal which could not
see his worth. "I say, Burnand," he has many times been reported to have
said at the Garrick Club and elsewhere, when the Editor had referred to
the heavy post-bag deli