er upon the stage.

In the same year appeared the commencement of the series "Mrs. Bibs'
Baby"--but it was not a success, and was entirely thrown into the shade,
as it appeared, by Thackeray's first triumph, the "Snob Papers." The
chief charm about "Mrs. Bibs' Baby" is that it was the outcome of
Jerrold's passionate love of children. This delightful trait in
Jerrold's character--as in Steele's, Fielding's, Goldsmith's, and
Dickens's--has been common to many of the _Punch_ Staff, as we know in
their lives and have seen in their works. We all know how Thackeray
never saw a boy without wanting to tip him--a practical form of sympathy
which found great approval. Leech loved all children, even the terrible
ones, and makes us feel it in his drawings. Mr. du Maurier adores the
nice and the pretty ones, and even has a fatherly sort of pity for the
stupid and the ugly. Mr. Harry Furniss's "Romps" reflects his keen
delight in young people, the wilder the better. Shirley Brooks loved to
read the "Jabberwock" to them, and Sir John Tenniel, like his old chief,
Mark Lemon, loved them for their childhood's sake--or he would never
have been able to give us "Alice in Wonderland." Of course, there may be
others on the Staff who have no particularly pronounced feeling in this
direction; but Jerrold would often go out of his way to introduce babies
into his serious articles. He speaks somewhere of something "sweeter
than the sweetest baby"--and once said that "children are earthly idols
that hold us from the stars." So he began "Mrs. Bibs' Baby," and felt
humiliated and disappointed when the public showed no glimmer of
interest in it, and he was soon induced by his own good sense and the
editorial hint to desert his latest offspring.

Then came "The Female Robinson Crusoe," and the last (modified) success,
"Twelve Fireside Saints;" but outside undertakings were almost
monopolising his attention. His "Weekly Newspaper," founded on the
strength of his "Q Papers," had been born and was already dead. His
powerful novel "A Man Made of Money" made his next unqualified success;
then in 1850 he became attached to the "Examiner," and two years later
"Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper" brought him an editorship and a thousand
pounds a year--and he knew at last, and for the first time, the meaning
of freedom from care. He became, moreover, independent of the publishers
of _Punch_, to whom he was pecuniarily indebted, although they had more
than once raised h