Atlantic Monthly | Page 9

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