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 a
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