tand you had all gone to Gravesend"--showing the one touch of
nature which made all _Punch_-men kin.

In due course Landells acquired Last's share, and the printing was
executed successively by Mr. Mitchell and by Mills, Jowett, and Mills,
until it slid by a sort of natural gravitation into the hands of
Bradbury and Evans. Landells had endeavoured to interest his friends in
the paper, but soon discovered the fatal truth that one's closest
friends are never so close as when it is a question of money.

Then came the Almanac, upon which were based many hopes that were
destined to be more than realised. It has hitherto been considered as
the work of Dr. Maginn, at that time, as at many others, an unwilling
sojourner in a debtor's prison. But H. P. Grattan has since claimed the
distinction of being, like the doctor, an inmate of the retreat known as
Her Majesty's Fleet, where he was visited by Henry Mayhew. Mayhew, he
said, lived surreptitiously with him for a week, and during that time,
without any assistance from Dr. Maginn, they brought the whole work to a
brilliant termination. Thirty-five jokes a day to each man's credit for
seven consecutive days in the melancholy privacy of a prison cell is
certainly a very remarkable feat--hardly less so than the alleged fact
that Mayhew, who proposed the Almanac, as he proposed so many other good
things for _Punch_, should have gone to the incarcerated Grattan for
sole assistance, when he and his co-editors had so many capable
colleagues at large. The claim does not deserve full credence,
especially in face of Landells' declaration that "everyone engaged on it
worked so admirably together, and it was done so well, that the town was
taken by surprise, and the circulation went up in that one week from
6,000 to 90,000--an increase, I believe, unprecedented in the annals of
publishing." The Almanac became at once the talk of the day; everybody
had read it, and a contemporary critic declared that its cuts "would
elicit laughter from toothache, and render gout oblivious of his toe."

Now, although Bradbury and Evans had hesitated to become proprietors,
they had had no objection to act as printers and publishers, and when
the editors approached them they lent a ready ear. "It was Uncle Mark,"
said "Pater" Evans at the "Gentleman's Magazine" dinner in 1868, "who
was the chief conspirator when they brought _Punch_ to Whitefriars; it
was his eloquence alone that induced us to buy _Punch_. Je