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 wit