cheek." They vied
with each other in their vocabulary of praise; and as to _Punch's_ quips
and sallies, his puns, his propriety, his "pencillings," and his
cuts--they simply defied description; you just cracked your sides with
laughter at the jokes, and that was all about it.

Yet, notwithstanding all this praise, the paper did not prosper; but
whether it was that the price did not suit the public, although the
"Advertiser" really blushed to name it, or that _Punch_ had not yet
educated his Party, cannot be decided. The support of the public did not
lift it above a circulation of from five to six thousand, and on the
appearance of the fifth number Jerrold muttered with a snort, "I wonder
if there will ever be a tenth!" Everything that could be done to command
attention, with the limited funds at disposal, was done. No sooner was
Lord Melbourne's Administration defeated and discredited (for the
Premier was angrily denounced for hanging on to office), than _Punch_
displayed a huge placard across the front of his offices inscribed, "Why
is _Punch_ like the late Government? Because it is JUST OUT!!" And no
device of the sort, or other artifice that could be suggested to the
resourceful minds in _Punch's_ cabinet, was left untried. Things were
against _Punch_. It was not only that the public was neglectful,
unappreciative. There was prejudice to live down; there were stamp duty,
advertisement duty, and paper duty to stand up to; and there were no
Smiths or Willings, or other great distributing agencies, to assist.

While Bryant was playing his uphill game, _Punch_, written by educated
men, was doing his best not only to attract politicians and lovers of
humour and satire, but to enlist also the support of scholars, to whom
at that time no comic paper had avowedly appealed; and it is doubtless
due to the assumption that his readers, like his writers, were gentlemen
of education, that he quickly gained the reputation of being entitled to
a place in the library and drawing-room, diffusing, so to speak, an
odour of culture even in those early days of his first democratic
fervour. We had a German "Punchlied," Greek Anakreontics, and plenty of
Latin--not merely Leigh's mock-classic verses, but efforts of a higher
humour and a purer kind, such, among many more, as the "Petronius," and
the clever interlinear burlesque translations of Horace which came from
the pen of H. A. Kennedy. Then "Answers to Correspondents" were
maintained