The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857

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in the presence of such phenomena as are to be seen in London alongside
of our civilization. If any feeling of Jerrold's was 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 favorite Hood:--

"Poor Peggy sells flowers from street to street,
And--think of that, ye 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 was his view, though I don't think he ever carried it so far as he
was accused of doing. Nay, I think he sometimes had to prick up his zeal
before assuming the _flagellum_. For a successful, brilliant man like
himself,--full of humor and wit,--eminently convivial, and sensitive to
pleasure,--the temptation rather was to adopt the easy philosophy that
every thing was all right,--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. It was
to Douglas's credit that he always felt the want of a deeper 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, and he sacredly cherished high aspirations. To him buffoonery
was pollution. He attached to _salt_ something of the sacredness which
it bears in the East. 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 which illustrates his mind, his
character, and biography.

The "Q." papers, I say, were the first essays which attracted attention
in "Punch." In due time followed his "Punch's Letters to his Son," and
"Complete Letter-Writer," with the "Story of a Feather", mentioned above.
A basis of philosophical observation, tinged with tenderness, and a dry,
ironical humor,--all, like the Scottish lion in heraldry, "within a double
tressure-fleury and counter-fleury" of wit and fancy,--such is a Jerroldian
paper of the best class in "Punch." It stands out by itself from all
the others,--the sharp, critical knowingness, sparkling with puns, of a
Beckett,--the inimitable, wise, easy, playful, worldly, social sketch of
Thackeray. In imagery he had no rivals there; for his mind had a very
marked tendency to the ornamental and illustrative,--even to the grotesque.
In satire, again, he had fewer competitors than in humor;--sarcasms lurk
under his similes, like wasps in fruit or flowers. I will just quote one
specimen from a casual article of his, because it happens to occur to my
memory, and because it illustrates his manner. The "Chronicle" had been
attacking some artists in whom he took an interest. In replying, he set
out by telling how in some vine countries they repress the too luxuriant
growths by sending in asses to crop the shoots. Then he remarked gravely,
that young artists required pruning, and added, "How thankful we ought all
to be that the 'Chronicle' keeps a donkey!" This is an average specimen of
his playful way of ridiculing. In sterner moods he was grander. Of a Jew
money-lender he said, that "he might die like Judas, but that he had no
bowels to gush out";--also, that "he would have sold our Saviour for _more
money_." An imaginative color distinguished his best satire, and it had the
deadly and wild glitter of war-rockets. This was the most original quality,
too, of his satire, and just the quality which is least common in our
present satirical literature. He had read the old writers,--Browne, Donne,
Fuller, and Cowley,--and was tinged with that richer and quainter vein
which so emphatically distinguishes them from the prosaic wits of our day.
His weapons reminded you of Damascus rather than Birmingham.

A wit with a mission,--this was the position of Douglas in the last years
of his life. Accordingly he was a little ashamed of the immense success of
the "Caudle Lectures,"--the fame of which I remember being bruited about
the Mediterranean in 1845,--and which, as social drolleries, set nations
laughing. Douglas took their celebrity rather sulkily. He did not like
to be talked of as a funny man. However, they just hit the reading
English,--always domestic in their literary as in their other tastes,--and
so helped to establish "Punch" and to diffuse Jerrold's name. He began
now to be a Power in popular literature; and coming to be associated
with the _liberal_ side of "Punch," especially, the Radicals throughout
Britain hailed him as a chief. Hence, in due course, his newspaper and
his magazine,--both of which might have been permanently successful
establishments, had his genius for business borne any proportion to his
genius for literature.

This, however, was by no manner of means the case. His nature was
altogether that of a literary man and artist. He could not speak in public.
He could not manage money matters. He could only write and talk,--and
these rather as a kind of _improvvisatore_, than as a steady, reading,
bookish man, like a Mackintosh or a Macaulay. His politics partook of this
character, and I always used to think that it was a queer destiny which
made him a Radical teacher. The Radical literature of England is, with few
exceptions, of a prosaic character. The most famous school of radicalism
is utilitarian and systematic. Douglas was, emphatically, neither. He
was impulsive, epigrammatic, sentimental. He dashed gaily against an
institution, like a _picador_ at a bull. He never sat down, like the
regular workers of his party, to calculate the expenses of monarchy or the
extravagance of the civil list. He had no notion of any sort of "economy."
I don't know that he had ever taken up political science seriously, or that
he had any preference for one kind or form of government over another.
I repeat,--his radicalism was that of a humorist. He despised big-wigs,
and pomp of all sorts, and, above all, humbug and formalism. But his
radicalism was important as a sign that our institutions are ceasing
to be picturesque; of which, if you consider his nature, you will see
that his radicalism was a sign. And he did service to his cause. Not an
abuse, whether from the corruption of something old, or the injustice of
something new, but Douglas was out against it with his sling. He threw his
thought into some epigram which stuck. Praising journalism once, he said,
"When Luther wanted to crush the Devil, didn't he throw _ink_ at him?"
Recommending Australia, he wrote, "Earth is so kindly there, that, tickle
her with a hoe, and she laughs with a harvest." The last of these sayings
is in his best manner, and would be hard to match anywhere for grace and
neatness. Here was a man to serve his cause, for he embodied its truths in
forms of beauty. His use to his party could not be measured like that of
commoner men, because of the rarity and attractive nature of the gifts
which he brought to its service. They had a kind of incalculable value,
like that of a fine day, or of starlight.

He was now immersed in literary activity. He had all kinds of work on hand.
He brought out occasionally a five-act comedy, full as usual of wit. He
wrote in "Punch,"--started a newspaper,--started a magazine,--published
a romance,--all within a few years of each other. The romance was "A Man
made of Money," which bids fair, I think, to be read longer than any of
his works. It is one of those fictions in which, as in "Zanoni," "Peter
Schlemil," and others, the supernatural appears as an element, and yet is
made to conform itself in action to real and every-day life, in such a
way that the understanding is not shocked, because it reassures itself by
referring the supernatural to the regions of allegory. Shall we call this a
kind of bastard-allegory? Jericho, when he first appears, is a common man
of the common world. He is a money-making, grasping man, yet with a bitter
savour of satire about him which raises him out of the common place.
Presently it turns out, that by putting his hand to his heart he can
draw away bank-notes,--only that it is his life he is drawing away. The
conception is fine and imaginative, and ought to rank with the best of
those philosophical stories so fashionable in the last century. Its
working-out in the every-day part is brilliant and pungent; and much
ingenuity is shown in connecting the tragic and mysterious element in
Jericho's life with the ordinary, vain, worldly existence of his wife
and daughters. It is startling to find ourselves in the regions of the
impossible, just as we are beginning to know the persons of the fable. But
the mind reassures itself. This Jericho, with his mysterious fate,--is
not he, in this twilight of fiction, shadowing to us the real destiny of
real money-grubbers whom we may see any day about our doors? Has not the
money become the very life of many such? And so feeling, the reader goes
pleasantly on,--just excited a little, and raised out of the ordinary
temperature in which fiction is read, by the mystic atmosphere through
which he sees things,--and ends, acknowledging that with much pleasure he
has also gathered a good moral. For his mere amusement the best fireworks
have been cracking round him on his journey. In short, I esteem this
Jerrold's best book,--the one which contains most of his mind. Certain
aspects of his mind, indeed, may be seen even to better advantage in others
of his works; his sentimental side, for instance, in "Clovernook," where
he has let his fancy run riot like honeysuckle, and overgrow every thing;
his wit in "Time works Wonders," which blazes with epigrams like Vauxhall
with lamps. But "A Man made of Money" is the completest of his books as
a creation, and the most characteristic in point of style,--is based on
a principle which predominated in his mind,--is the most original in
imaginativeness, and the best sustained in point and neatness, of the works
he has left.

During the years of which I have just been speaking, Jerrold lived chiefly
in a villa at Putney, and afterwards at St. John's Wood,--the mention
of which fact leads me to enter on a description of him in his private,
social, and friendly relations. Now-a-days it is happily expected of every
man who writes of another to recognize his humanity,--not to treat him as
a machine for the production of this or that--scientific, or literary, or
other--material. _Homo sum_ is the motto of the biographer, and so of the
humbler biographic sketcher. Jerrold is just one of those who require and
reward this kind of personal sympathy and attention;--so radiant was the
man of all that he put into his books!--so quick, so warm, so full of light
and life, wit and impulse! He was one of the few who in their conversation
entirely come up to their renown. He sparkled wherever you touched him,
like the sea at night.

The first thing I have to remark, in treating of Jerrold the man, is the
entire harmony between that figure and Jerrold the writer. He talked very
much as he wrote, and he acted in life on the principles which he advocated
in literature. He united, remarkably, simplicity of character with
brilliancy of talk. For instance, with all his success, he never sought
higher society than that which he found himself gradually and by a natural
momentum borne into, as he advanced. He never suppressed a flash of
indignant sarcasm for fear of startling the "genteel" classes and Mrs.
Grundy. He never aped aristocracy in his household. He would go to a tavern
for his oysters and a glass of punches simply as they did in Ben Jonson's
days; and I have heard of his doing so from a sensation of boredom at a
very great house indeed,--a house for the sake of an admission to which,
half Bayswater would sell their grandmothers' bones to a surgeon. This kind
of thing stamped him in our polite days as one of the old school, and was
exceedingly refreshing to observe in an age when the anxious endeavour
of the English middle classes is to hide their plebeian origin under a
mockery of patrician elegance. He had none of the airs of success or
reputation,--none of the affectations, either personal or social, which
are rife everywhere. He was manly and natural,--free and off-handed to the
verge of eccentricity. Independence and marked character seemed to breathe
from the little, rather bowed figure, crowned with a lion-like head and
falling light hair,--to glow in the keen, eager, blue eyes glancing on
either side as he walked along. Nothing could be less commonplace, nothing
less conventional, than his appearance in a room or in the streets.

His quick, impulsive nature made him a great talker, and conspicuously
convivial,--yea, convivial, at times, up to heights of vinous glory which
the Currans and Sheridans shrank not from, but which a respectable age
discourages. And here I must undertake the task of saying something about
his conversational wit,--so celebrated, yet so difficult (as is notoriously
the case with all wits) to do justice to on paper.

The first thing that struck you was his extreme _readiness_ in
conversation. He gave the electric spark whenever you put your knuckle to
him. The first time I called on him in his house at Putney, I found him
sipping claret. We talked of a certain dull fellow whose wealth made him
prominent at that time. "Yes," said Jerrold, drawing his finger round
the edge of his wineglass, "_that's_ the range of his intellect,--only
it had never any thing half so good in it." I quote this merely as one
of the average _bons-mots_ which made the small change of his ordinary
conversation. He would pun, too, in talk, which he scarcely ever did in
writing. Thus he extemporized as an epitaph for his friend Charles Knight,
"GOOD NIGHT!"--When Mrs. Glover complained that her hair was turning
gray,--from using essence of lavender (as she said),--he asked her "whether
it wasn't essence of thyme?" On the occasion of starting a convivial club,
(he was very fond of such clubs,) somebody proposed that it should consist
of twelve members, and be called "The Zodiac,"--each member to be named
after a sign. "And what shall I be?" inquired a somewhat solemn man, who
feared that they were filled up. "Oh, we'll bring you in as the weight
in Libra," was the instant remark of Douglas. A noisy fellow had long
interrupted a company in which he was. At last the bore said of a certain
tune, "It carries me away with it." "For God's sake," said Jerrold, "let
somebody whistle it."--Such _dicteria_, as the Romans called them, bristled
over his talk. And he flashed them out with an eagerness, and a quiver of
his large, somewhat coarse mouth, which it was quite dramatic to see. His
intense chuckle showed how hearty was his gusto for satire, and that wit
was a regular habit of his mind.

I shall set down here some _Jerroldiana_ current in London,--some heard by
myself, or otherwise well authenticated. Remember how few we have of George
Selwyn's, Hanbury Williams's, Hook's, or indeed any body's, and you will
not wonder that my handful is not larger.

When the well-known "Letters" of Miss Martineau and Atkinson appeared,
Jerrold observed that their creed was, "There is no God, and Miss Martineau
is his prophet."

"I have had such a curious dinner!" said C. "Calves' tails."--"Extremes
meet," Douglas said, instantly.

He admired Carlyle; but objected that he did not give definite suggestions
for the improvement of the age which he rebuked. "Here," said he, "is a man
who beats a big drum under my windows, and when I come running down stairs
has nowhere for me to go."

A wild Republican said profanely, that Louis Blanc was "next to Jesus
Christ"--"On which side?" asked the wit.

Pretty Miss ----, the actress, being mentioned, he praised her early
beauty. "She was a lovely little thing," he said, "when she was a _bud_,
and"--(a pause)--"before she was a _blowen'_."--This was in a very merry
vein, and the serious reader must forgive me.

He called a small, thin London _litterateur_ of his acquaintance, "a pin
without the head or the point."

When a plain, not to say ugly, gentleman intimated his intention of being
godfather to somebody's child, Jerrold begged him not to give the youngster
his "mug."

A dedication to him being spoken of,--"Ah!" said he, with mock gravity,
"that's an awful power that ---- has in his hands!"

Carlyle and a much inferior man being coupled by some sapient review as
"biographers,"--"Those two joined!" he exclaimed. "You can't plough with an
ox and an ass."

"Is the legacy to be paid immediately?" inquired somebody,--_apropos_ of a
will which made some noise.--"Yes, on the coffin-nail," answered he.

Being told that a recent play had been "done to order,"--he observed, that
"it would be done to a good many 'orders,' he feared."

It may be honestly said that these are average specimens of the
pleasantries which flowed from him in congenial society. His talk was full
of such, among friends and acquaintance, and he certainly enjoyed the
applause which they excited. But in his graver and tenderer moods, in the
country walks and lounges of which he was fond, his range was higher and
deeper. For a vein of natural poetry and piety ran through the man,--wit
and satirist as he was,--and appeared in his speech, occasionally, as in
his writings.

A long habit of indulgence in epigram had made him rather apt to quiz
his friends. But we are to remember that he was encouraged in this, and
that a self-indulgent man is only too liable to have the nicety of his
sensitiveness spoiled. Certainly, he had a kind heart and good principles.
He would lend any man money, or give any man help,--even to the extent
of weakness and imprudence. This was one reason why he died no better
off,--and one reason why his friends have so much exerted themselves to pay
a tribute to his memory in the shape of an addition to the provision he had
made for his family. The quickness of feeling which belonged to him made
him somewhat ready to take offence. But if he was easily ruffled, he was
easily smoothed. Of few men could you say, that their natural impulses were
better, or that, given such a nature and such a fortune, they would have
arrived at fifty-four years of age with so young a heart.

The last literary event of any magnitude in Jerrold's life was his assuming
the editorship of "Lloyd's Newspaper." This journal, which before his
connection with it had no position to brag of, rose under his hands to
great circulation and celebrity. Every week, there you traced his hand
at its old work of embroidering with queer and fanciful sarcasm some bit
of what he thought timely and necessary truth. Against all tyrants, all
big-wigged impostors, black, white, or gray, was his hammer ringing, and
sparks of wit were flying about as ever under his hand. He was getting up
in years; but still there seemed many to be hoped for him, yet. Though not
so active in schemes as formerly, he still talked of works to be done; and
at "Our Club," and such-like friendly little associations, the wit was
all himself, and came to our stated meetings as punctually as a star to
its place in the sky. He had suffered severely from illness, especially
from rheumatism, at various periods of life; and he had lived freely and
joyously, as was natural to a man of his peculiar gifts. But, _death_! We
never thought of the brilliant and radiant Douglas in connection with the
black river. He would have sunk Charon's boat with a shower of epigrams,
one would have fancied, if the old fellow, with his squalid beard, had
dared to ask him into the stern-sheets. To more than one man who knew him
intimately the first announcement of his decease was made by the "Times."

On the evening of the 19th of May, I met him,--as I frequently did on
Saturday evenings,--and on no evening do I remember him more lively and
brilliant. Next Saturday, I believe, he was at the same kindly board; but
some accident kept me away;--I never saw him again. Soon after, he was
taken ill. There passed a week of much suffering. June had come, warm
and rainy, but our friend was dying. The nature of the illness might be
doubtful, but there could be no doubt that the end was near. He prepared
himself to meet it. He sent friendly messages of farewell to those he
loved, begging, too, that if what he had ever said had pained any one, he
might now be forgiven. His mind was made up, and his children were all
about him. On a fine evening in the first week of June, he was moved to the
window, that he might see the sun setting. On Monday, the eighth of that
month, being perfectly conscious almost till the very last, he died.

The time is not yet come to discuss what his ultimate place will be in
the literature of his century. It will not be denied that he was a man of
rare gifts, and of a remarkable experience in life; and his life and the
popularity of his writings will by and by help posterity to understand
this our generation. Meanwhile I shall leave him in his resting-place in
Norwood, among the hills and fields of Surrey, near the grave of the friend
of his youth, the gentle and gifted Laman Blanchard, where he was laid on
the 15th of June, amidst a concourse of people not often assembled round
the remains of one who has begun life as humbly as he did.

His death made a great impression; and the acuteness with which his friends
felt it said more than could be said in a long dissertation for the kindly
and love-inspiring qualities of the man. As soon as it appeared that his
family were left in less prosperous circumstances than had been hoped,
their interest took an active form. A committee met to organize a plan
by which the genius of those who had known Jerrold might be employed in
raising a provision for his family. The rest has been duly recorded in the
newspapers, where the success of these benevolent exertions may be read.

FLORENTINE MOSAICS.

I.

HISTORICAL.

The capital of Tuscany--according to its most respectable and veracious
chroniclers--is the oldest city extant. Its history is traced with great
accuracy up to the Deluge, which is as much as could be reasonably
expected. The egg of Florence is Fiesole. This city, according to the
conscientious and exhaustive Villani, [Footnote: Cronica. Lib. I. c. vii.]
was built by a grandson of Noah, Attalus by name, who came into Italy in
order "to avoid the confusion occasioned by the building of the Tower of
Babel." [Footnote: "per evitare la confusione creata per la edificazione
della torre di Babel," etc.] Noah and his wife had, however, already made
a visit to Tuscany, soon after the Deluge; so that it is not remarkable
that "King Attalus" should have felt inclined to visit the estates of his
ancestor. At the same time, it is obvious that the Noahs had not been
satisfied with the locality, and had reemigrated; for Attalus, upon his
arrival, found Italy entirely without inhabitants. He, therefore, with
great propriety claimed jurisdiction over the whole country, elected
himself king, and his wife Electra queen; built himself a palace, with a
city attached to it; and in short, made himself, generally, at home. We
are also fortunate in having some genealogical particulars as to his wife's
antecedents; and it is to be regretted that modern historians, of the
skeptical, the irreverent, and the startling schools, could not imitate
the gravity, the good faith, and the respect for things established, by
which the elder chroniclers were inspired. The apothecaries of the Middle
Ages never dealt so unkindly with the Pharaohs of Egypt, as the historical
excavators of more recent times have done with the embalmed, crowned, and
consecrated mummies which they have been pleased to denounce as delusions.
Your Potiphars or your Mizraims, even when converted into balsam, or
employed as a styptic, were at least not denuded of their historical
identity by the druggists who reduced their time-honored remains to
a powder. Their dust was made merchandise, but their characters were
respected. Moreover, there was an object and a motive, even if mistaken
ones, on the part of the mediaeval charlatans. But what ointment, what
soothing syrup, what panacea has been the result of all this pulverizing of
Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Mucius Scaevola and Junius Brutus? Are all the
characters graven so deeply by the stylus of Clio upon so many monumental
tablets, and almost as indelibly and quite as painfully upon school-boy
memory, to be sponged out at a blow, like chalk from a blackboard? We, at
least, cling fondly to our Tarquins; we shudder when the abyss of historic
incredulity swallows up the familiar form of Mettus Curtius; we refuse to
be weaned from the she-wolf of Romulus. Your unbelieving Guy Faux, who
approaches the stately superstructures of history, not to gaze upon them
with the eye of faith and veneration, but only that he may descend to the
vaults, with his lantern and his keg of critical gunpowder, in order to
blow the whole fabric sky-high,--such an ill-conditioned trouble-tomb
should be burned in effigy once a year.

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