He accepted his new position with admirable cheerfulness and resolution; honestly earning his money, and affectionately devoting it to the necessities of his parents. A delightful anecdote of him, at this time of his life, is told by his son. On one of the occasions when his mother and sister were absent in the country, the little domestic responsibility of comforting the poor worn-out old father with a good dinner, rested on Douglas's shoulders. With the small proceeds of his work, he bought all the necessary materials for a good beef-steak pie--made the pie himself, succeeding brilliantly with the crust--himself took it to the bake-house--and himself brought it back, with one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, which the dinner left him just money enough to hire from a library, for the purpose of reading a story to his father in the evening, by way of dessert. For our own parts, we shall henceforth always rank that beef-steak pie as one among the many other works of Douglas Jerrold which have established his claim to remembrance and to regard. The clue to the bright affectionate nature of the man--sometimes lost by those who knew him imperfectly, in after life--could hardly be found in any pleasanter or better place, now that he is gone from among us, than on the poor dinner-table in Broad Court. Although he was occupied for twelve hours out of the twenty-four at the printing-office, he contrived to steal time enough from the few idle intervals allowed for rest and meals, to store his mind with all the reading that lay within his reach. As early as at the age of fourteen, the literary faculty that was in him seems to have struggled to develop itself in short papers and scraps of verse. Only a year later, he made his first effort at dramatic composition, producing a little farce, with a part in it for an old friend of the family, the late Mr. Wilkinson, the comedian. Although Samuel Jerrold was well remembered among many London actors as an honest country manager; and although Douglas could easily secure, from his father's friends, his admission to the theatre whenever he was able to go to it, he does not appear to have possessed interest enough to gain a reading for his piece when it was first sent in to the English Opera House. After three years had elapsed, however, Mr. Wilkinson contrived to get the lad's farce produced at Sadler's Wells, under the title of More Frightened than Hurt. It was not only successful on its first representation, but it also won the rare honour of being translated for the French stage. More than this, it was afterwards translated back again, by a dramatist who was ignorant of its original history, for the stage of the Olympic Theatre; where it figured in the bills under the new title of Fighting by Proxy, with Liston in the part of the hero. Such is the history of Douglas Jerrold's first contribution to the English drama. When it was produced on the boards of Sadler's Wells, its author's age was eighteen years.