at the same time it gave some offence. A reminiscence of a
literary _protegee_ 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