, interviewing a
"coster"--"drawing him," while Horace Mayhew took down everything the
man said.

Such was the man who conceived _Punch_ as it came to be, and who wrote
of it when it was established, "I smell lots of tin thereabouts; but our
Lemon requires a great deal of squeezing." What was his connection with
_Punch_, how he agreed with Lemon as to the transfer to Bradbury and
Evans, how he found himself replaced by (or, as he considered, outwitted
by) Mark Lemon in the editorship has already been recited. Nevertheless,
he was retained as "Suggestor-in-Chief"--an office which suited him well
enough, considering his hatred of the drudgery of writing.

"Mr. Henry Mayhew," writes _Punch's_ ex-Printer, "the special
joke-provider for _Punch_, was a most jocular character. He would
stand beside the compositor while he was working at his case, and
closely watch every movement of his hand in picking up each letter.
He said he could not make out how ever the compositor could keep
the alphabetical order of each box in his memory. So to master the
mystery he set to work and learned the boxes for himself, and would
often find amusement, when waiting for a proof, in setting up a few
lines, very slowly at first, but, shifting the composing rule and
thoughtlessly laying down the stick the wrong way, generally upset
all his work, and so he gave it up in despair. This Mr. Mayhew was
very clever in creating and roughly sketching out many of the small
comic column illustrations, and would write the witty inscriptions
for them. These would then go to the artist, who sketched out the
idea and so completed it. In _Punch_, as in many other similar
works, the mind to invent the idea caricatured, and the hand that
pencils it, belong to two very different persons and capacities.
Mr. Mayhew was very clever in this way, and anything of a comic
nature he saw he would at once sketch off and then have a cut made
of it. Most of the inimitable cuts in the first few volumes of
_Punch_ are of his invention. He was always sketching and taking
rough notes of everything he saw. The great John Leech called him
his indispensable 'Jack-all, or broad-grin provider.'"

In spite of his disappointment, Henry Mayhew remained with _Punch_ until
1845. His last literary contribution--"A Shaksperean Nursery Rhyme," on
the subject of Macready playing S