hardships of a sailor's life. That a boy should "rough it." was an idea he frequently and earnestly put forth. He believed that this roughing process gave manliness to a boy's naturethat it steeled him to fight the world. Yet, he saw in the life of a "middy" something too rough to be good-something that might make a very brutal man. His admiration for the midshipman who had fought his way to command, and had kept the gold of his original nature in him, with that wondrous touch of feminine tenderness which belongs to sailors of the better class-his admiration for this triumph of nature over adverse conditions was boundless. Of Nelson he would talk by the hour, and some of his more passionate articles were written to scathe the government that left Horatia, Nelson's legacy to his country, in want. It was difficult, nevertheless, to persuade him that a man did wisely in sending his son to sea. A friend called on him one day to introduce a youth, who, smitten with the love for the salt, was about to abandon a position he held in a silk-manufacturer's establishment, for the cockpit.

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'Humph!" said the ex-midshipman of the Ernest ; SO you are going to sea. In what department of industry, may I inquire, do you now give your exertions?"

"Silk," briefly responded the youth.

"Well, go to sea, and it will be worsted."

At the end of the war Jerrold quitted the service, and another calling had to be chosen. He was apprenticed to Mr. Sidney, a printer, in Northumberland Street, Strand. One of his biographers remarks that the duties of a compositor demand such constant attention, that the subject-matter of his employment can rarely engage his thoughts; yet we differ from this observer, and suspect the printing-office to have been to such a mind as Douglas Jerrold's more of a home than it would have been to an ordinary mind. Indeed, this biographer tells us that Jerrold became his own instructor after the hours of labour. He made himself master of several languages. His "one book" was Shakspeare. He cultivated the habit of expressing his thoughts in writing; and gradually the literary ambition was directed into a practicable road. In his fourteenth year he said boldly to Mr. Wilkinson: "I'll write a piece for you," and he did not forget the promise. The bold little printer, "as he began to cast together bits of verse, and to ponder long works, he still read eagerly, in the intervals of labour. The circumstances.

of his parents became easier in 1817 than they had been since the family's departure from Sheerness; and his opportunities for study were consequently improved. The wild enthusiasm of Samuel Jerrold's fair-haired boy about this time is remembered." But to Edmund Kean did " young Douglas give all his enthusiasm. Wherever Edmund Kean appeared, there his devoted young admirer endeavoured to be, his eager eyes drinking in the genius of his model. For twelve hours daily he was in Mr. Sidney's printing-office; but in the hours for rest and food, reading and writing could be done. Sonnets, short papers, verses on the usual young boy's subjects, began to ooze from him. "As he sat in the pit of the great theatres, listening to the splendid elocution of Kean, or as he laughed at the wondrous drolleries of Mathews, certainly the passion grew upon him to be something within these dazzling walls."

In 1818 (his fifteenth year) he wrote his first piece, which he sent in to Mr. Arnold, of the English Opera House, where it remained for two years. It was probably never read. After some difficulty he got it back. In 1821, Mr. Egerton, becoming manager of Sadlers' Wells, purchased the piece, which was first performed on April 30, 1821, in its author's eighteenth year. It was highly successful; was translated and acted on the French stages; and oddly enough, some years after it has been produced in France, Mr. Kenney being in Paris, saw it played there, and not knowing its history, thought it worth his while to re-translate it; and he actually brought it out at Madam Vestris's Olympic Theatre, under the name of Fighting by Proxy, written by the boy of fifteen, sparkling with bright retorts, and the plot full of comic action. Yet, for three long weary months it lay in Mr. Arnold's cupboard; "Rupell," said Douglas Jerrold, the successful author, "Rupell was the only man, when I was a poor boy, who gave me hope." He had the sagacity to see the brilliant promise and daring courage of the printer's little apprentice, and how he was catching the spirit of journalism, with which he first came in direct contact in the printingoffice of Bell's Life in London. His first printed works appeared in Arliss' Sixpenny Pocket Magazine, edited by R. A. Davenport. The young compositor, Jerrold, having an order to see Der Freischütz, went to the theatre, and became so possessed with the harmony of the work that he wrote a critical paper on it, and dropped the composition into the letter-box of

the Sunday Monitor; next morning the editor handed Jerrold his own article to compose.

“Laman Blanchard and Douglas Jerrold met by accident before either friend had reached his majority: the latter was pushing his way into current journalism; the former was writing graceful poetry. Yet their common object just now, as they stood under the gateway protected from the rain, was of Byron and liberty. The noble was the idol of the hour. He was a bard, and he was the champion of liberty. Why should they not follow him-join him in Greece? The two friends were roused to frenzy with the idea, and the fair, blueeyed one, suddenly seeing the ludicrous position of the two Greek crusaders, sneaking out of a shower of rain, dashes into the wet, saying: 'Come, Lam, if we're going to Greece, we mustn't be afraid of a shower of rain.'

"But the rain poured down, and the pair got valorously wet to the skin. I fear,' said Douglas Jerrold, years afterwards, recalling the incident, I fear the rain washed all the Greece out of us.' When Byron died, Douglas Jerrold wrote in a volume of his poems :—

"God, wanting fire to give a million birth,

Took Byron's soul to animate their earth.'

The rain had not been able to wash all the Greek romance out of one, at least, of the enthusiasts.

"Jerrold's prospects were not yet brilliant. True it was that his farce of More Frightened than Hurt proved a hit, and he had written three other pieces, for which the munificent Mr. Egerton, of Sadlers' Wells, had given him £20!”—Life, by Blanchard Jerrold.

Defiance of the critics made in the bitterness of his knowledge that the world had all along been taught by shallow men to regard Jerrold as a cynic, "he had to the last a heart below the rugged surface of him, as tender as a woman's." The late James Hannay, in the year 1857, touched on this popular mistake, and corrected it: "Inveterately satirical as Jerrold is, he is even 'spoonily' tender at the same time, and it lay deep in his character; for this wit and bon vivant, the merriest and wittiest man of the company, would cry like a child as the night drew on, and the talk grew serious. The basis of his nature was sensitiveness and impulsiveness. His wit is not of the head only, but of the heart-often sentimental, and constantly fanciful; that is, dependent upon a

quality which imperatively requires a sympathetic nature to give it full play. Take those Punch papers, which soon helped to make Punch famous, and Jerrold himself better known. Take the Story of a Feather as a good expression of his more earnest and tender mood. How delicately all the part about the poor actress is worked up! How moral, how stoical the feeling that pervades it! The bitterness is healthy-healthy as bark. We cannot always be

in the presence of such phenomena as are to be seen in London alongside of our civilization. If any feeling of Jerrold's were intense, it was his feeling of sympathy with the poor. I shall not soon forget the energy and tenderness with which he would quote these lines of his favourite, Hood :—

"Poor Peggy sells flowers from street to street,
And-think of that who find life sweet!—
She hates the smell of roses.'

He was therefore to be pardoned when he looked with extreme suspicion and severity on the failings of the rich. They, at least, he knew, were free from those terrible temptations which beset the unfortunate. They could protect themselves. They needed to be reminded of their duties. Such were his views, though I don't think he ever carried them so far as he was accused of doing. For a successful, brilliant man like himself, full of humour and wit, eminently convivial and sensitive to pleasure, the temptation rather was to adopt the easy philosophy that everything was all right, and that the rich were wise to enjoy themselves with as little trouble as possible, and that the poor (good fellows, no doubt) must help themselves on according as they got a chance. was to Douglas's credit that he always felt the want of a deep and holier theory, and that, with all his gaiety, he felt it incumbent on him to use his pen as an implement of what he thought reform. Indeed, it was a well-known characteristic of his, that he disliked being talked of as a 'wit.' He thought (with justice) that he had something better in him than most wits. He was fuller of repartee than any man in England, and yet was about the last man that would have condescended to be what is called a 'diner-out.' It is a fact that illustrates his mind, character, and biography."

It

Mr. Blanchard Jerrold observes: "This is just criticism, the fruit of personal knowledge. My father might have pushed more rapidly to comfort in his early days, had he been possessed of a more pliant nature; but his road was straight ahead. Timid friends looked on at the struggle, and offered tender counsel. 'God send you more successful days,' wrote tender Laman Blanchard to him, in 1842; for, apart from other considerations, there is something in success that is necessary to the softening and sweetening of the best disposed natures; and nothing but that, I do believe, will so quickly convince you of the needless asperity of many of your opinions, and of the pain done to the world when you tell it you despise it.'

:

"He shall never be understood, save by a very few near friends, while he lives," as he himself wrote, when dedicating his Cakes and Ale to Thomas Hood; it shall be " necessary for him "still to do one thing ere the wide circle and the profound depth of his genius shall be to the full acknowledged that one thing is to die." Yet, out come the tender touches of his nature even in these early days of fighting with the world; and Mr. Blanchard Jerrold prints some touching verses as evidence of that softer and more tender spirit which, he insists, was the motive-power of even the fiercest invective and sarcasm to which the name of Douglas Jerrold is attached.

Jerrold's way was now clearing to the higher places--to the New Monthly and Blackwood's Magazine, where his contributions were soon recognized; so that in his cottage in Park Village, "he began to feel his feet upon something like vantage ground."

His grand success was the production of Black-Eyed Susan. "In a most fortunate hour he quarrelled finally with Mr. Davidge-with Davidge who, could he have seen the story of that little manuscript under the author's arm, would have fallen upon his knees and prayed for it at any price. But manager and author parted in anger, and away went the latter direct to Mr. Elliston's room at the Surrey Theatre. This manager's fortunes were at a low ebb, and he was not ready to adventure much; but a bargain was made; an engagement as dramatic writer to the establishment, at £5 per week, was concluded; and the author deposited upon the manager's table, by way of beginning, the 'nautical and domestic' drama of Black-Eyed Susan; or, All in the Downs.