of the discussion.

When we were associated in remembrance of the late Mr. Douglas
Jerrold, he delivered a public lecture in London, in the course of
which, he read his very best contribution to Punch, describing the
grown-up cares of a poor family of young children. No one hearing
him could have doubted his natural gentleness, or his thoroughly
unaffected manly sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read the
paper most pathetically, and with a simplicity of tenderness that
certainly moved one of his audience to tears. This was presently
after his standing for Oxford, from which place he had dispatched
his agent to me, with a droll note (to which he afterwards added a
verbal postscript), urging me to "come down and make a speech, and
tell them who he was, for he doubted whether more than two of the
electors had ever heard of him, and he thought there might be as
many as six or eight who had heard of me". He introduced the
lecture just mentioned, with a reference to his late electioneering
failure, which was full of good sense, good spirits, and good
humour.

He had a particular delight in boys, and an excellent way with them.
I remember his once asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had
been to Eton where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did
in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give
him a sovereign? I thought of this when I looked down into his
grave, after he was laid there, for I looked down into it over the
shoulder of a boy to whom he had been kind.

These are slight remembrances; but it is to little familiar things
suggestive of the voice, look, manner, never, never more to be