old made no reply, to the astonished delight of the
rival press. No man had greater courage than he; but he probably found
that he had nothing more to say, seeing that from week to week for years
past he had written against Bunn all he knew or could think of. And when
Shirley Brooks struck at him in "The Man in the Moon" in the course of a
mock election-address beginning--"I hate the humbug of the 'wrongs of
the poor man' class of writing when any sneaking rascal is found
poaching and punished for it"--Jerrold held his peace, and in due time
voted to have the damaging assailant invited to join _Punch's_ Staff.
Mrs. Landells, without straining their friendship, called him "the
little wasp" to his face; but, as Leigh Hunt more justly said, if he had
the sting of the bee, he also had the honey. When Jerrold said in his
wife's presence that a man ought to be able to change a spouse like a
bank-note--change one of forty for two of twenty--he indulged in kindly
chaff which she well understood and could appreciate; and when, on the
occasion of a party at their house, he replied to a question as to who
was dancing with his wife, "Oh, a member of the Humane Society, I
suppose," she had no objection to Leech making it into a picture for
_Punch's_ pages. When Jerrold said anything witty he would always laugh
frankly and unreservedly at it, and, like Dickens, he would burst out
laughing as he wrote, when he struck upon a comic idea for _Punch_.

The report that Mark Lemon said of Douglas Jerrold that "he was
doubtless considered caustic because he blackened every character he
touched" is probably apocryphal--though Jerrold's occasional treatment
of Lemon might perhaps have justified some sort of retaliation from his
genial Editor. Still, it was Jerrold's firm belief, as he declared to
Mr. Sidney Cooper, R.A., that he had never in his life said or written a
bitter thing of anyone who did not deserve it. But when he was on his
death-bed, the day before he died, he sent a last affectionate message
to his old comrades at the Table: "Tell the dear boys that if I've ever
wounded any of them, I've always loved them." Horace Mayhew was with him
when he passed away, and thence from the bedside brought the dead man's
love to them as a token to wipe out the sting of words which, if they
had not been forgotten, had been forgiven long ago.

After 1848 Jerrold wrote less and less for _Punch_; but until 1857, the
year of his death, he faithfully