h these "Q Papers" that he began, and he threw into them some
of his strongest and most withering writing, and oftentimes some of his
weakest sense. With his soft heart melting for the poor, and his fiery
hatred of oppression warping his better judgment, he was led into that
unreasoning attack upon property and authority to which Thackeray
deprecatingly alludes. Because the poor are unhappy, according to his
philosophy, therefore are the rich, most of them, their direct
oppressors, and ruling bodies, tyrants. Fiercely upright and
aggressively impulsive in his championship of the lowly, he was anything
but sound and thorough in his premisses; and had he the power he might
have wielded later, his defects as a political economist would
infallibly have brought about disaster. "His Radicalism," his son has
told us, "was that of a humorist"--that is to say, all his power and all
his wit as a writer (and they had few, if any, equals in the press), all
his genius for invective and ridicule, and all his commanding influence
with the public, were directed against Society and the powers that were,
simply from a playful sense of humour! Luckily, the evil, or at least
the danger, thus found a corrective for itself; for although Jerrold's
power, and with it _Punch's_, grew with amazing rapidity among all
classes, his tirades were felt to come more from the humorist's heart
than from the statesman's brain. It is thus easy to draw a comparison
between Jerrold and Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, of whom Carlyle says:
"He is a humorist from his inmost soul; he thinks as a humorist, he
feels, imagines, acts as a humorist. Sport is the element in which his
nature lives and works.... A Titan in his sport, as in his earnestness,
he oversteps all bounds, and riots without law or measure." The words
might almost have been written of Jerrold himself. But, for all that, he
was generally recognised as a leading champion of the people's rights
and reformer of their wrongs; and to this passionate earnestness, to
this keen wit and shrewd sincerity of the unconsciously special pleader,
_Punch_ owed most of the early notice he obtained, and much of his
influence in the worlds of politics and Society.

These papers, then, of which the first was "Punch and Peel" (July 24th,
1841), were, in fact, political leading-articles, satirical, ironical,
bitter, and more often demagogic than humorous, though of wit and humour
both there was a generous undercurrent. _P