Witticisms by Douglas Jerrold.

Bruce Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 180, 23 October 1903, Page 3

Witticisms by Douglas Jerrold.

■ .- : H» r If his name be" handed down to posterity, this will be not on account of his books, • but L acause . of his conversational powers. He had a genius for. j repartee. Many of the best things he i said are too well known to bear, re- ! petition. Perhaps the most famous i was his reply to Albert Smith, whom he ' disliked arid" frequently ■> 'abused. Smith grew tired of being made the 'butt of the other's wit, and one day plaintively remarked : "After all, Jerrold, we row in the same boat." "Yes," answered the "wasp," like a flash of lightning, "but not with the same skulls."* It was not of -Albert Snyth, but of a very much overrated author whose works were being praised to him, that he said : " I quite agree with you that he should have an itch in the Temple of Fame." It may have been the author who said to him, " I hear you say — was the worst book I eyer wrote." '"No, I didn't," Jerrold assured him; <lr i said it was the worst book that anybody ever wrote." Jerrold . did not disdain the pun in conversation, though it does not often figure in his writings. " Well Talfourd," he said to the author of "Ion," "have you any more 'lons' in the fire ?" It was he who suggested that the most fitting epitaph for Charles Knight, the publisher, would be "pood Night!" His quarrels with actors during the years of his dramatic activity were incessant ; he complained that they would give their ideas of the character rather than his. Once he complained of the inferior company that was performing one of his plays at the Haymarket Theatre. "Why, there's V—," said the manager, protesting, "he was bred on these boards." "He looks as if he had been cut out of them," growled the playwright. Jerrold was always very nervous on a ''first night." An-, other dramatist, popularly supposed to "lift" his plots and situations from the French, assured him that he did not know the meaning of nervousness on such an occasion. " I can quite understand that," the wit said pleasantly : "your pieces have always been tried I before." " Call that a kind man," said an actor, speaking of an acquaintance who was abroad ; " a man who is away from his family, and never sends them a farthing ! Call that kindness !" " Certainly,'; said Jerrold,*! "unremitting kindness." " Really," said a lady, speaking about a baby, " I cannot find words to convey to you even a faint idea of its pretty ways." "T see, it is a child more easily conceived than de-^ scribed." He hated snobbishness, and when Samuel Warren one day complained that at a ducal house where he had dined he could get no fish, " I suppose," said Jerrold, " they had eaten it all upstairs." — Lewis Melville, in the Bookman.