well Amateur:_ "No--the comb!"

(_From the Sketch by Henry Walker._)]

It may be added that when _Punch_ artists re-draw and touch up an
outsider's sketch, it is their usual practice not to sign their
drawings, but to leave them without any indication of their authorship.

Apart from these willing contributors are those from whom the Editor,
always on the look-out for new blood and fresh wit, invites
contributions, having seen good work of theirs elsewhere.

[Illustration:

_Eminent Musician:_ "You play, I believe?"

_Swell Amateur:_ "Ya-as!"

_Eminent Musician:_ "Concertina?"

_Swell Amateur:_ "No--comb!"

(_Reduced from the Drawing by G. du Maurier in "Punch," 20th June,
1868._)]

It is often thus that _Punch's_ ranks are recruited, and that Mr. Lucy,
Mr. Lehmann, Mr. Partridge, Mr. Phil May, and others have been drawn
into the agreeable vortex of Whitefriars.

On at least one occasion, however, _Punch_ threw his kerchief in vain,
for Mr. Bristed tells us, in his "Five Years at an English University,"
how the Epigram Club, of Oxford, was invited by the Editor to send its
productions to _Punch_, but that "with true English reserve" the Society
came to an agreement that all their transactions should remain in
manuscript.

Beside the editor of a comic journal stalks a demon on either hand--the
Belial of Plagiarism and the Beelzebub of Repetition. The public looks
to him to be a wit and a humorist, with a knowledge of every witticism
that ever was made. If he suffer an old joke to appear, some "constant
reader" will surely find him out, and publish the fact abroad with
malignant glee. There are few vices so deeply resented as the telling of
an old joke; in an editor it is recognised as amounting to crime. But
those who judge so severely have clearly never made a scientific study
of the Joke. It is not sufficient to analyse a witticism and dissect it,
in the cold spirit of that terrible book called "A Theory of Wit and
Humour," till its humour flies, like the delicate bouquet from uncorked
wine. The genealogy of jokes and twists of humour and of thought, of
form and application, must be traced; and the student will find that in
respect to a great proportion of our verbal jests of to-day they may be
tracked up to the Middle Ages, back to Classic times, and lost perchance
in the Oriental recesses of a jocular past. It is not only a case of
mere unconscious repetition or of brazen-faced plagiarism that