During the years of which I have just been speaking, Jerrold lived chiefly
in a villa at Putney, and afterwards at St. John's Wood,--the mention
of which fact leads me to enter on a description of him in his private,
social, and friendly relations. Now-a-days it is happily expected of every
man who writes of another to recognize his humanity,--not to treat him as
a machine for the production of this or that--scientific, or literary, or
other--material. _Homo sum_ is the motto of the biographer, and so of the
humbler biographic sketcher. Jerrold is just one of those who require and
reward this kind of personal sympathy and attention;--so radiant was the
man of all that he put into his books!--so quick, so warm, so full of light
and life, wit and impulse! He was one of the few who in their conversation
entirely come up to their renown. He sparkled wherever you touched him,
like the sea at night.

The first thing I have to remark, in treating of Jerrold the man, is the
entire harmony between that figure and Jerrold the writer. He talked very
much as he wrote, and he acted in life on the principles which he advocated
in literature. He united, remarkably, simplicity of character with
brilliancy of talk. For instance, with all his success, he never sought
higher society than that which he found himself gradually and by a natural
momentum borne into, as he advanced. He never suppressed a flash of
indignant sarcasm for fear of startling the "genteel" classes and Mrs.
Grundy. He never aped aristocracy in his household. He would go to a tavern
for his oysters and a glass of punches simply as they did in Ben Jonson's
days; and I have heard of his doing so from a sensation of boredom at a
very great house indeed,--a house for the sake of an admission to which,
half Bayswater would sell their grandmothers' bones to a surgeon. This kind
of thing stamped him in our polite days as one of the old school, and was
exceedingly refreshing to observe in an age when the anxious endeavour