THE MARINE GHOST, OR WHO MILKED THE CAPTAIN'S COW? E. Howard.

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144

A complete Index, classified into Authors and their countries, divided also into Poetry and Prose.

sad Alphabetically arranged for all the work, complete, will appear in the last volume.

V

Story of the Bad Little Boy who didn't Come to Grief . . Saml. L. Clemens (Mark Twain) 372

My Next Husband.

Sonnet to a Clam

Anonymous

John G. Saxe

PORTRAITS ("Shakspeare," "Cervantes," and "Rabelais")

TRIAL SCENE FROM THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (Ingoldsby Legends)

THE POLITICAL JOVE (Solid for Mulhooly)

E. A. SOTHERN AS LORD DUNDREARY

JACK FALSTAFF AND DOLL TEARSHEET

MRS. CRAWFORD AND MISS HARPER AS MRS. FORD AND MRS. PAGE IN THE

THE LIBRARY

OF

WIT AND HUMOR.

MRS. CAUDLE'S CURTAIN LEC

TURES.

[DOUGLAS JERROLD, the author of these inimitable

Lectures, was born in London, Jan. 3, 1803. His father being manager of Sheerness theatre, his earliest impressions received a dramatic coloring. Smitten in boyhood with a passion for the sea, a midshipman's appointment was procured for him; but in a short time he quitted that service, and was presently articled to a printer. He studied diligently between the hours of labor and thus acquired a good education. While still a compositor, he made his literary début

with an anonymous essay on the opera of "Der Freischütz," which he dropped into the letter-box of the editor of the paper on which he was working. The

article was handed to him to put in type, and accom.

panying it was a cordial editorial invitation to the unknown correspondent to contribute other articles. Mr. Jerrold's first dramatic composition, Black-Eyed Susan the most popular of dramas-was written before he was twenty one years old. It was followed by Nell Gwynne, The Prisoner of War, Time Works Wonders, and other plays, which sustained and widened the author's fame. But his labors were by no means re

stricted to dramatic composition. Stories, essays, and editorials, claimed a large share of his busy life. Among the best known of his narrative pieces, are The Story of a Feather, Clovernook, St. Giles and St. James. From the second number of that famous journal, Punch, Mr. Jerrold contributed regularly to its

pages until his death, which occurred June 8, 1857.

The strongest impulse of popularity that Punch ever

received, came from the immortal Caudle Lectures; and

this is saying much when it is remembered what a brilliant galaxy of writers and draughtsmen were em

How could such a thing have entered any man's mind ?”

There are subjects that seem like raindrops to fall upon a man's head, the head itself having nothing to do with the matter. The result of no train of thought, there is the picture, the statue, the book, wafted, like the smallest seed, into the brain, to feed upon the soil, such as it may be, and grow there; and this was, no doubt, the accidental cause of the literary sowing and expansion-unfolding like a night-flowerof MRS. CAUDle.

But let a jury of gentlewomen decide.
It was a thick, black, wintry afternoon,
when the writer stopped in the front of the
play-ground of a suburban school. The
ground swarmed with boys full of the
Saturday's holiday. The earth seemed
roofed with the oldest lead; and the wind
Minories. But these happy boys ran and
came, sharp as Shylock's knife, from the
jumped, and hopped and shouted, and
unconscious men in miniature-in their
own world of frolic, had no thought of the
full-length men they would some day be-
come; drawn out into grave citizenship;
formal, respectable, responsible. To them
the sky was of any or all colors; and for
that keen east-wind-cutting the shoulder-
blades of old, old men of forty-they in
their immortality of boyhood had the red-

ployed upon that paper in Jerrold's time. The Curtain
Lectures hold so perfectly the "mirror up to nature,"
that they are as fresh to-day as when first written, and
they will continue to afford delight and to point their
peculiar moral, till human nature ceases to be what it
now is. But why longer detain the reader when Mrs.
Caudle is present to speak for herself? We seem to
hear her emphatic tones break upon the solemn still-der faces and the nimbler blood for it.
ness of the night, their monotony varied at intervals
by the suppressed groans of the afflicted Job.]

VOL. I.-W. H.

And the writer, looking dreamily into that play-ground, still mused on the robust jol

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