five years after his brother
Arthur--Gilbert a Beckett joined the salaried Staff, and three years
later he was appointed to the Table. He had a very quaint humour and a
wonderfully quick and startling sense of the incongruous. He was sadly
hampered by his affliction, but he was an accomplished, high-principled,
sensitive fellow, of whom one of his companions declared that "he was
the purest-minded man I ever knew." Under more favourable conditions of
health he would probably have made a greater mark; but as it was, he did
good work. He was a happy parodist, and a very neat and smart
versifier--at the age of fifteen he had gained the prize for English
verse at Westminster, which was open to the whole school--and in the
wildly absurd yet laughable vein of his bogus advertisements (of which
he did many under the head of "How we Advertise Now"--a continuation of
Jerrold's early idea) none of his _Punch_ brethren could touch him. He
was, perhaps, best known to the world as part author of the famous
political burlesque of "The Happy Land;" less, perhaps, as part author
of "The White Pilgrim;" and least of all as a musical composer, as it
was under the pseudonym of "Vivian Bligh" that he put forth his songs
and his music for the "German Reeds' Entertainment." But his work on
_Punch_ was always relished, and, considering his sad physical
afflictions, he held his own on the Staff. He contributed both prose and
verse, smart and apt of their kind. He wrote--in part, at least--the
admirable parody of a boy's sensational shocker (p. 119, Vol. LXXXII.,
March 11th, 1882). With the exception of this and the comical
"Advertisements" he did very few "series," but his contributions were
always varied and excellent in their way, and himself appreciated as a
useful and clever man. Perhaps his chief claim to recollection was his
suggestion, as explained elsewhere, of the famous cartoon of "Dropping
the Pilot." The Dinners were his greatest pleasure, and he attended them
with regularity, although the paralysis of the legs--the result of
falling down the stairway of Gower Street Station--from which he
suffered (in common with his uncle Sir William a Beckett, and with one
of the Mayhew brothers as well) rendered his locomotion and the
mounting of Mr. Punch's stairway a matter of painful exertion. Although
he did useful work for _Punch_, he never became a known popular
favourite; yet when he died--on October 15th, 1891--a chorus of
unanimous regr