n!" he said one day,
looking up from his block, when he was more than usually confidential,
"if it had not been for _Punch_, I wonder where I should be!"

Mr. Joseph Swain retired in 1890 from the business he had formed, and
handed it over to his son, who had been many years identified with it,
and still continues the weekly engraving of the _Punch_ cartoon.
Wood-engraving has now been abandoned for all other illustrations, the
first process block tried on the paper being Mr. Linley Sambourne's
drawing called "Reconciliation, a scene from the new screaming farce,
the 'Political Box and Cox,'" on the 3rd December, 1892 (p. 273); but
that the innovation has been equally happy in the case of every artist I
am not prepared to maintain.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Mr. George Dalziel writes to me: "For myself I was somewhat
intimately connected with the publication from its birth; being
associated with Landells as an engraver, it fell to my lot to engrave
... the first drawing contributed by John Leech, under the title of
'Foreign Affairs,' with many of the cartoons by Kenny Meadows, as well
as many of the drawings of every artist engaged upon the journal, so
long as Landells had anything to do with _Punch_."

[28] With the exception of the Almanac cartoon, for which the engraver
has ample time.

CHAPTER XII.

_PUNCH'S_ WRITERS: 1841.

Mark Lemon--As Others Saw Him--His Duties--His Industry--His Staff
and their Apportioned Work--Lemon as an Editor--And Diplomatist--A
Testimonial--And a Practical Joke--Henry Mayhew--His Great Powers
and Little Weaknesses--Disappointment and Retirement--Stirling
Coyne--Gilbert Abbott a Beckett--His Early Career--Tremendous
Industry--A Beckett and Robert Seymour--Appointed
Magistrate--Locked In--Angus B. Reach.

[Illustration: MARK LEMON

(From a private photograph.)]

Mark Lemon was thirty-one when he found himself co-editor of _Punch_.
His salary, it is true, was not more than thirty shillings a week; but
it was to rise before his death to fifteen hundred pounds a year--a
higher amount, it is said, than has been received by any other "weekly
editor," before or since. However, he had found financial salvation; for
although his playwriting had not been unsuccessful--and by the time he
died his pieces were to be numbered by the score--the drama in the days
of short runs was not a remunerative form of literature. His natural
_bonhomie_ stood him in