g his faculty to bear on the risibility of the English public.

Mr. Henry Pottinger Stephens, one of the wits of the "Sporting Times,"
the founder of the "Topical Times," and member of the staff of the
"Daily Telegraph," was for two or three years on the outside salaried
Staff of _Punch_. Contributing from 1889 to 1891, he wrote a series of
"queer tales" as well as some attacks on the then South Western Railway
management, under the title of "The Ways of Waterloo." Such dramatic
criticisms as were not undertaken by Mr. Burnand or relegated by him to
Mr. Arthur a Beckett, and numerous trifles besides, fell to him to do;
but on his departure for America the connection was broken, and not
afterwards resumed.

Passing by Mr. C. W. Cooke, we find Mr. Charles Geake, member of the Bar
and Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, as the chief recruit of the year
1890. To "The Granta" he had sent a casual contribution, and Mr. R. C.
Lehmann, appreciating his talent, proved his esteem by installing Mr.
Geake as the Cambridge editor of that paper. From "The Granta" to
_Punch_ has become a natural ascent, and on July 12th, 1890, Mr. Geake
made his first bow to London readers. Three months later a packet of
_Punch_ office envelopes announced that he had been placed on the
footing of a regular outside contributor, and that it was now his
privilege to send his work straight to the printer's. At first he wrote
nothing but verse--society verse, ballades, rondeaux, topical verse, and
parodies in verse and prose, and then burlesques of books, such as the
capital imitation of "The Tale of Two Telegrams" (a "Dolly Dialogue" in
the manner of "Anthony Hope"), p. 97, Vol. CVII., September 1st, 1894,
and "The Blue Gardenia" (October 20th, 1894, p. 185), with various skits
and topical matter. "Lays of the Currency" are among the chief of Mr.
Geake's poetical "series," and "Chronicles of a Rural Parish"--the
adventures and misadventures of a rural parishioner who wishes to
patronise the Parish Councils Act--his principal effort in comic prose.

The year 1892 brought three new writers: Mr. Gerald F. Campbell, who
began by contributing (on April 23rd) poems of sentiment, such as "Town
Thoughts from the Country," and three months later "The Cry of the
Children" and "Alone in London;" R. F. Murray, the American-born author
of "The Scarlet Gown," who, through Mr. Andrew Lang's introduction, sent
in a few verses shortly before his death; and Mr. Roberts, w