JOHN LEECH, TOM TAYLOR, AND PART OF HORACE MAYHEW.
(Drawn by R. Doyle.)
It cannot be said that his editorship was a success. His fun was too scholarly and well-ordered, too veiled, deliberate, and ponderous; and under him Punch touched its lowest point of popularity.
"In humour slow, though sharp and keen his mind;
His hand was heavy, though his heart was kind."
His popularity among the outsiders was great, as I have learnt from many of his old contributors; for he loved to extend his hospitality to young men at his house, Lavender Sweep, at Wandsworth, and to send kindly notes of encouragement and promises of future help. Nevertheless, he was ever the butt of rival publications. In one of them a cartoon, entitled "An Editor Abroad," was published, showing Mr. Burnand and Mr. du Maurier helping him and his Punch Show out of the mud in which he had stuck; in another he was represented as "The Trumpet Blower;" while in an article in "The Mask" (April, 1868), before he had assumed his sway, Mr. Punch is supposed to point to "Mark Lemon's Triumphal Car" and, referring to Taylor, to say: "He is our seraph.... His adaptations, I assure you, are delightful. You must be well up in Michel Levy's répertoire to find him out. He is so very artful."
A peculiar feature of Tom Taylor's editorship was the hieroglyphical character of his handwriting. His missives of instructions to artists and writers came as a terror to the receivers, who could make little of them. "Mr. Tom Taylor's letters," Mr. Swain informs me, "were often very difficult to decipher. His writing was peculiar, and he would also continue the letter if necessary in any odd corner that was vacant. I remember his writing some instructions to an artist one day in this fashion, while I stood at his table, and, while blotting it, saying, 'You can send it off, but I don't think he'll be able to make it out.'" To this experience may be added my own—that I have been the first to decipher one of these notes addressed to an unattached artist, now understood for the first time, nearly twenty years after it was written. To the compositors he was a perpetual tribulation; and it is doubtful if he could not have given points to Horace Greeley. That his son helped him, towards the end, in a secretarial sort of way, was no doubt a saving mercy.
His was one of the busiest literary and journalistic careers of the day; and when he died he left a void—great, it is true, yet in one respect easily enough filled. But it was little to his friends that his humour was not of the brightest and lightest, for his heart was of the warmest, as Mr. George Meredith set forth in the October number of the "Cornhill Magazine," to which he contributed a noble tribute—"To a Friend Recently Lost, T. T."—a sonnet beginning:—
"When I remember, Friend, whom lost I call
Because a man beloved is taken hence,
The tender humour and the fire of sense
In your good eyes: how full of heart for all;
And chiefly for the weaker by the wall,
You bore that light of sane benevolence:"
The Punch men, themselves, in a whole-page obituary (July 24th, 1880), bore graceful testimony to his personal worth. "That he is not with us," they said, "is hard to imagine.... A cultivated man of letters, an admirable scholar, he was as free from pedantry as he was incapable of idleness. From first to last he was, in the highest and best sense, 'Thorough.' ... Quick to detect and appreciate talent, he was ready in every way and on all occasions to hold out a helping hand to a beginner." Thus feelingly they spoke of "the dear friend" they had lost. For in his death they forgot the little annoyances they had suffered from the tampering with their lines and spoiling their points, of which they had sometimes had occasion to complain; with other drawbacks belonging to an essentially fidgety nature. It may safely be said, that if he left a hard task to his successor to work up the reputation of Punch as a comic paper, he did not at least render it difficult for him to make his mark by comparison.
No new humorist appeared in the volumes for 1845, although a poet of eminence found expression on a single occasion. To one Kelly is to be credited some humorous verses on "Dunsinane;" to J. Rigby, an Irish Song; to Leech, his Harlequinade verses (which do not aspire even to the dignity of a "trifle" or doggerel); to Watts Phillips, a few articles of little importance; and to J. King, the verses in which an "Exiled Londoner" (p. 147, Vol. IX.) apostrophises his beloved Babylon. The one contribution of importance was that of Mr. Coventry Patmore.