Notwithstanding all this, the concluding chapter of this curious autobiography is devoted to the subject of 'Agreeable Recollections,' and the old man not ungracefully leaves the stage after a dignified reference to the various additions which he has been permitted to make to human knowledge, especially in his endeavour to discover those laws of mind by which man's intellect passes from the known to the discovery of the unknown.' After having given up all hope of completing any one of the calculating machines himself, Babbage told a friend that he meant to leave behind him notes and diagrams sufficient to enable some future 'philosopher' to carry out his idea of the Analytical Engine. Judging by our philosopher's own experience of the matter, it might have occurred to him that the most useful notes he could have left to his successor would have been banknotes to the value of some twenty thousand pounds. A FORGOTTEN JESTER If an inquiring stranger in London, at any time between 1827 and 1857, should have happened to ask who was then reputed to be the wittiest man in England, nine out of every ten who pretended to any familiarity with the literary society of the metropolis would have pointed out a dapper little fellow, standing scarcely more than five feet high, whose short, but by no means thin or fragile-looking, body was surmounted by a big head, a face furnished with a prominent aquiline nose, a pair of quick-glancing blue eyes overhung by bushy eyebrows, and a mass of long hair flung carelessly back from a smooth, high forehead, which altogether gave him something of a leonine appearance. If our inquiring stranger had gone on to ask what were the most characteristic performances of this lion-headed little man, it would at once have become apparent that Douglas Jerrold's fame as a convivial wit had already threatened to eclipse his reputation as a writer. His sharp sayings, carelessly flung at high and low (says his son), so circulated about London that hundreds of men who had never read a line he had written knew his name as connected with some flash of wit, some happy epithet, some biting jest.' His power of repartee was extraordinarily spontaneous. But the abundant wit was too often of a somewhat acrid flavour; and as, of course, it was always the biting jest which was best remembered and travelled farthest, the wittiest man in London was currently reported to be also something of a brute. His friend Charles Mackay said that, 'when his jest came to the tip of his tongue, it had to explode, though the heavens should crack, or his best friend take it amiss.' And it is something of a testimony to the existence of certain other sterling qualities which his friends were forced to recognise in Jerrold's character, that they did not more often take amiss the pointed shafts which he was perpetually aiming at all around him. Mrs. Cowden Clarke, indeed, tells us that he had a way of looking at you, when he dealt a repartee, which so plainly showed his own sense of the fun of the thing, and so evidently called for a similar appreciation on the part of the victim, that the joke was deprived of all personality or ill-nature. His reported jests do not altogether give that impression. We row in the same boat, you know,' said a certain humorous writer pleasantly to him, by way of enlisting his sympathy in some literary project. 'Yes,' was the prompt and unconciliatory reply, 'we row in the same boat-but with very different skulls!' Another acquaintance (according to one version of the story, it was Thackeray) walked |