is salary (once in order to enable him to dispense
with working for the "Pictorial Times"); but his indebtedness he felt as
a tie, which was none the less irksome that it was a golden fetter which
bound him to his friends. Still, to the end he sent in his satires,
couplets, and epigrams--stinging, brilliant, and original--jokes and
sarcasms by the score, but extremely few puns.

Sometimes, reviving the memories of his early trade, he would enter the
compositors' room, and, while waiting for a proof, would seize a
"stick," set up some concluding lines or a fresh paragraph in type, and
even make his own corrections in proof, almost driving the "reader" out
of his mind, until he learned how the corrections and additions had been
effected.

That Jerrold's wit ran in a higher groove than mere verbal quips and
cranks is proved by the retorts and epigrams that have been preserved
and ticketed in cases like a collection of brilliant butterflies. When
one March or April he tumbled backwards into water where, but for the
unseasonable weather, no water ought to have been, he suggested that the
accident was "owing to the backward spring;" reminding us of that
similar witticism of Henry Compton's, when fine hot weather followed
suddenly on March snows--"We have jumped from winter to summer without a
spring." His reply was characteristic to the poet Heraud's enquiry as to
whether he had seen his "Descent into Hell" (then newly published)--"I
wish to Heaven I had;" together with his well-known retort to Albert
Smith, who, before he left the paper, protested coaxingly against
Jerrold's merciless chaff, adding, "After all, you know, we row in the
same boat." "True," answered Jerrold, quick as thought, "but not with
the same skulls."

But he did not always come off scot-free; and, like many a wit whose
tongue is feared, he could be silenced by a well-directed thrust which,
for want of practice and experience in defence, he knew not how to
parry. Mr. Charles Williams tells me the story, recounted to him by
Thackeray, of how, when one wet night they were all at a little
oyster-shop then facing the Strand Theatre, the barmaid Jane, thoroughly
out of humour at Jerrold's chaff, slapped down before the little man the
liquor he had ordered, with the words, "There's your grog and take care
you don't drown yourself;" with the effect of damping his spirits for
the rest of the night. When Alfred Bunn retaliated with "A Word with
Punch,"[39] Jerr