ume, when the popular
Editor received from his proprietors a purse of a hundred guineas and a
tankard, and from them and the Staff a gold watch and chain of eleven
links, with a lock in the form of a book, as recounted in the sketch of
Mark Lemon's life.

Then, again, there was Thackeray's "Atonement Dinner," if I may call it
so, for the slight he had unthinkingly cast upon the Staff. In his now
celebrated laudatory essay on John Leech in the "Quarterly Review" he
had written: "There is no blinking the fact that in Mr. Punch's Cabinet
John Leech is the right-hand man. Fancy a number of _Punch_ without
Leech's pictures! What would you give for it? The learned gentlemen who
write the work must feel that, without him, it were as well left alone."
Picture the indignation in the office, imagine how strongly would be
resented this _faux pas_ of Thackeray, in which he allowed his
enthusiasm for one friend to overlook, and that not inoffensively, the
feelings of the others! The writer was abroad at the bursting of his
little bomb, and no one was more distressed than himself at the result
of the explosion or readier to admit the fault. He wrote a handsome
letter of apology to Percival Leigh--he explained how "of all the slips
of my fatal pen, there's none I regret more than the unlucky half-line
which has given pain," and declared that it was more than his meaning;
and he begged furthermore that the memory of the lapsus--painful equally
to him and to Leech--might be wiped out in a dinner given by himself to
the confraternity. And they all came to his house in Kensington Palace
Gardens, and Thackeray was duly chaffed and teased--"and who can doubt,"
says Trollope, "but they were very jolly over the little blunder?"

Then there was the Staff dinner at the Crystal Palace to inaugurate the
new series of "The Gentleman's Magazine," when _Punch_ and _Punch_
history were greatly to the fore; and the great dinner at the "Albion"
to celebrate Mr. Burnand's accession to the editorial chair--when not
only the Staff, but for the first time since the early days all
"outside" contributors to _Punch_ were invited, when, although the
subject of the cartoon had previously been settled, a certain amount of
business was gone through, just to show "how it was done." And who that
was there on that great occasion will forget the speech of Mr.
Blatchford--an artist who was the natural successor to Colonel
Howard--he who signed his drawings with a tri