a principle which predominated in his mind,--is the most original in imaginativeness, and the best sustained in point and neatness, of the works he has left. 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 of the English middle classes is to hide their plebeian origin under a mockery of patrician elegance. He had none of the airs of success or reputation,--none of the affectations, either personal or social, which are rife everywhere. He was manly and natural,--free and off-handed to the verge of eccentricity. Independence and marked character seemed to breathe from the little, rather bowed figure, crowned with a lion-like head and falling light hair,--to glow in the keen, eager, blue eyes glancing on either side as he walked along. Nothing could be less commonplace, nothing less conventional, than his appearance in a room or in the streets.