once. His best
ideas are enjoyed and used, and in due time are sent back, often quite
innocently, for re-issue. Nay, even what is popularly known in England
as "modern American humour" has been claimed as a leaf out of _Punch's_
book, quaint exaggeration forming its staple feature, as in the case
where we are told that "a young artist in Picayune takes such perfect
likenesses that a lady married the portrait of her lover instead of the
original."

Lastly, a couple of drawings by Mr. du Maurier may be referred to
(second volume for 1872, and first volume for 1894), which created a
good deal of amusement at the time of their publication. In the first
case a visitor calls to inquire after the condition of a happy mother.
And the babe, is it a boy? "No," says the page. Ah! a girl. "No,"
repeats the lad. What is it, then? asks the startled visitor. "If you
please," replies the intelligent retainer, "the doctor said it was a
Heir!" Now, this joke almost textually reproduces a circumstance
attending the birth of that Earl of Dudley of whom Rogers wrote the
epigram which Byron thought "unsurpassable":--

"Ward has no heart, they say; but I deny it;
He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it."

The second drawing reproduces a story (long since forgotten) of the
first Duke of Wellington, who joined a notorious gambling club, with the
express view, it was said, to black-balling his son, the Marquis of
Douro, a likely candidate--and then went complacently and told him so.

Much the same difficulty attending the identification and indexing of
the jokes of the past is experienced in respect to _Punch_ itself.
Consider for a moment. That work consisted in the summer of 1895 of 108
volumes. At the moderate estimate of four jokes per column, attempted
and made, we reach a grand total of nearly 270,000 jokes--a total
bewildering in its vastness, and representing, one would think, all the
humour that ever was produced since this melancholy world began. The
mind refuses to grasp such a mass of comicality; how, then, would you
classify this prodigious joviality and sarcasm? How detect a joke that
may reappear under a hundred disguises of time, place, condition, and
application--yet the same root-joke after all? Is it surprising that the
same ideas recur--and, recurring, sometimes escape the shrewd eye of
_Punch's_ investigation department?

It has already been said that to Sir John Tenniel it has fallen to
prevent the repetition