From early manhood until his death H. C. Bunner was the editor of “Puck.” Those who appreciated the flavor of Airs from Arcady and Rowen, and who knew of “Puck” only that it was our most popular comic weekly, felt here an incongruity. If they had followed the editorial page, they would have found dignity no less than pungency, and might have comprehended the man as more than a maker of delicate verses and more than a humorist. In the ordinary sense he was hardly a humorist. Humor was large in him, but all suffused with fancy. Loving New York as Charles Lamb loved London, he was even more like Lamb in that his quip habitually carried a sentiment springing from human sympathy. This ultimate quality reconciled the others of a singularly original composition.

His fiction shows all these traits, and also a nice sense of form. He was a student of Boccaccio; he experimented with various adaptations, as in The Third Figure of the Cotillion with the method of Irving; and, though his preference was for freer and more spontaneous structure, he was keenly aware, as in the story below, of the value of the unities.