“Do,” said Jerrold—“do, and tie this sweet motto round its neck: ‘When this you see, remember me.’”
He had little mercy for pretentious prigs, who always abound in “literary circles.” A young author had written on the same subject as Lamartine, and bragged of it.
“Ah,” said he, “Lamartine and I row in the same boat.”
“Yes,” said Jerrold, “but not with the same skulls.”
Another of these gentry, praising one of his own plays, said to Jerrold:
“Do you remember the baroness in that play?”
“Oh, yes,” said Jerrold. “I never read anything of yours without being struck with its barrenness!”
At the same time he always had a friendly hand for a man who was too hard hit. A newspaper called the Chronicle, once attacked a young friend of his, savagely assailing his work. Jerrold took up the cudgels and wrote in his defense. He began by telling how, in some countries, the too luxuriant growth of the vine is prevented by sending asses in to crop the rising shoots. Then he gravely added:
“Even so young authors require pruning; and how thankful we all ought to be that the Chronicle keeps an ass!”
Walking one day in the Haymarket, then a rather disreputable promenade, some one met him, and thus accosted him: