Ponny then breaks out again with his bilingual vehemence and Parisian gestures. (Some people never can talk French without trying to shrug shoulders.) Brandishing his dessert-knife, he shouts, 'Avançons, mes amis! go ahead, my boys! En avant! Excusez-moi,' and scatters scraps of French about, till Leech cries, 'There, don't talk like a lady's-maid, Ponny; why can't you speak English?' And, to change the talk, he tells of a French sport'man taking his first fences here, with rather a fresh horse which has been lent him. After coming a couple of bad 'croppers,' which he conceives to be the usual style of leaping here in England, he says a little sadly, 'My friend, I t'ank you for your 'orse, bot I t'ink dat I s'all jomp no more at present.'
Somebody caps this with tale of a 'Mossoo' who manifests deep sorrow at the death of an old hare, slain by an English visitor. 'Hélas! il est mort enfin! Mon pauvre vieux! I have shot at him for years! He was all the game I had!'
And Leech tells another story of a foreigner of distinction hunting in the Midlands, and hearing the cry 'Stole away!' and shouting out excitedly, 'Aha, stole a vay, has he, de old t'ief! Den I suppose we s'all not find a vay to him, and so we must go home!' ... Which we do.
J. BERNARD PARTRIDGE'S INITIALS.
Thus, for half a century has Wednesday evening been passed in the editorial office of Punch, just when its readers are discussing the merits of the previous week's issue; and according to the verdict of those readers was attuned the merriment of the Staff. It is on record how Douglas Jerrold would go radiant to the Dinners as "Mrs. Caudle" was sending up Punch's circulation at a rapid rate; "and was one of the happiest among them all." Thackeray, too, first tasted the delights of wide popularity in the success of his "Snob Papers," and he showed the pleasure he felt in his demeanour at the board. At one time these two men sat side by side, and there was as little love as space between them; but with the good-humoured philosophy which is a tradition of that institution, the occasional differences of opinion, and the harder knocks of wit, and sometimes, even, the still sharper encounters of temper, were all glossed over. As Thackeray so truly remarked himself—"What is the use of quarrelling with a man if you have to meet him every Wednesday at dinner?" Nevertheless, in course of time he changed his seat from between Jerrold and Gilbert Abbott à Beckett, and, crossing over, faced his friend the enemy, while Mark Lemon, watchful and alert beneath the cloak of geniality, was quick to cast a damping word on inflammable conversation and—so far as he could persuade them to listen to a man so greatly their inferior in genius and intellect—to stem the threatened outburst. As a matter of fact, Jerrold always regarded Thackeray as a bit of a snob and viewed his entrance into Society—against which Jerrold had for years been hurling his bitterest darts—with very grave suspicion. "I have known Thackeray," he would say, "for eighteen years, and I don't know him yet"—almost in the despairing words in which I have heard a distinguished Academician speak of his still more distinguished President. On the other hand, Mr. Arthur à Beckett has declared to me, "I never knew my brother so well as when I met him at the Punch Table."
PHIL MAY'S INITIALS.
