ed to
_Punch's_ Pocket-Book. Sober in judgment and wise in counsel, he was
greatly missed when his genial companionship was lost to _Punch's_
Knights of the Round Table.

Passing over Mr. W. S. Gilbert's connection with the paper--which is
described in the section devoted to artistic contributors--we find
another humorist, equally distinguished, who identified himself with the
paper the same year, Charles F. Browne, better known as "Artemus Ward."
He had arrived in England early in the year, and soon after his arrival
he was invited by Mark Lemon to contribute. Ward was at that time in
failing health, and, according to his secretary and manager Mr.
Kingston, two or three of the papers produced in accordance with the
understanding that was entered into were written with painful
effort--the reason, no doubt, why so little of his usually rollicking
humour is to be found in them. Nowadays many Americans profess to regard
_Punch_ with a sort of scornful amusement, and "Life," with an
assumption of lofty disdain, is for ever sneering at it as a survival of
the unfittest; and the same line is taken in England by New Journalists
and Newer Critics. Not that the New American Journalist was unknown in
Ward's day. He had already declared that "Shakespeare wrote good plase,
but he wouldn't have succeeded as the Washington correspondent of a New
York daily paper. He lacked the reckisit fancy and imagination." Anyhow,
he did not live so near to the _fin de siecle_; nor was he ashamed to
own that for years it had been his pet ambition to write for the "London
Charivari." Unhappily, its realisation came too late to permit him to do
justice to his talent and his humour; and he himself was only too
conscious of his sad shortcoming, or, rather, of his failing powers.
Only eight papers had come from his hand when it closed in death. In
September the first of his papers was published--"Personal
Recollections;" the last in November--"A Visit to the British Museum;"
they are garrulous and discursive, and a good deal of the humour they
contain was repeated from earlier works. That they should have contained
any at all, under the circumstances, is the wonder; indeed, one is
irresistibly reminded by them of his own humorous reference to one of
the burlesque "pictures" illustrative of his "Lecture." "It is by the
Old Masters," he said, in his quaint, sad way; "it is the last thing
they did before dying. They did this, and then they died."

[Illu