He evidently accepted my
little sketches only for the promise, not the performance, of them. Some
were rejected. This was done so genially that I found myself hastening
to refuse my own drawings for him rather than put him to the effort of
sparing my feelings while doing so. 'Here I sit,' he said, 'like a
great ogre, eating up people's little hopes.' Then he showed me his
waste-paper basket, and added--'But what am I to do? Look here!' I
confess I never saw, except on pavement in coloured chalks, such
nerve-twisting horrors as the paper sketches people sent." It is obvious
from this that the writer never watched the pictures entering the Royal
Academy on Sending-in Day.

Mark Lemon loved _Punch_; as well he ought. He refused to visit America
to give his readings on terms that were highly alluring, as he could not
find it in his heart to abandon the command, even for a time, nor bear
to miss his two days a week at Whitefriars. When he said truly that he
and _Punch_ were made for each other, and that he "would not have
succeeded in any other way," he might fairly have added, had he wished,
how hard he had laboured for that success. Mr. Birket Foster has drawn
me a vivid picture of how in those early days he had to visit Lemon in
his Newcastle Street lodgings, and, mounting to the topmost storey,
found him in an untidy, undusted room, sitting in his shirt-sleeves,
with Horace Mayhew by his side plying the scissors, working at the
weekly "make-up" of _Punch_ with the desperate eagerness that was, in
time, to bear so rich a harvest.

How Mark Lemon helped to bring together the original Staff has already
been seen. It was, doubtless, his sound display of business capacity and
character, in addition to his literary aptitude, that induced Henry
Mayhew and Landells to nominate him as one of the co-editors--for that
was a quality in which both Henry Mayhew and Stirling Coyne were
confessedly deficient. "There are forty men of wit," says Swift, "for
one man of sense." So the paper was started, and the very first article,
"The Moral of _Punch_," was Lemon's;[29] but neither then nor after did
he write much for it, though he still contributed a certain amount of
graceful, serious verse, under the title of "Songs for the Sentimental,"
with a farcical last line which affects the reader suddenly like a cold
douche. He wrote, as well, many short epigrams, paragraphs, and the
like, besides being a fairly prolific suggestor of the carto