Mr. Punch's History of Modern England Vol. II (of IV),--1857-1874

My dear Colenso,

With regret,

We hierarchs, in conclave met,

Beg you, you most disturbing writer,

To take off your colonial mitre.

This course we press upon you strongly:

Believe me,

Yours most truly,

Longley.

Lambeth.

My dear Archbishop,

To resign

That Zulu diocese of mine,

And own myself a heathen dark

Because I've doubts of Noah's Ark,

And feel it right to tell all men so,

Is not the course for

Yours,

Colenso.

Kensington.

Dean Stanley and Père Hyacinthe

Stanley was appointed to the Deanery of Westminster in 1863, and the lamentations of the Record, the organ of ultra-orthodox Evangelicalism, gave Punch his opportunity:-

That the wisdom and justice of the appointment of Canon Stanley to the Deanery of Westminster might be clear to everybody, the Record gives its certificate that such appointment is "a melancholy fact." Disapprobation by the Record having been thus signified, of course every sensible person must now be convinced that the Dean is the right man in the right place.

Comments of this sort add to the liveliness of newspaper controversy, but they do not conduce to the popularity of those who indulge in them. But at any rate they are an improvement on Punch's references to the "viperine expectorations" of the editor of the Tablet in earlier years.

The welcome extended to Père Hyacinthe in 1869 showed that Punch was not restricted in his sympathies to Protestant heretics only. But we fear that his welcome was not entirely disinterested. In his verses on "Hyacinthus Redivivus," Punch attacks Pius IX for favouring Père Hyacinthe as long as he was a winning card, and then rending him as a heretic. The lines are friendly, but reading between them one can detect a warning to M. Loyson to shun the dangers that beset the fashionable preacher in New York, whither he was then bound. We cannot resist the feeling that Punch was more pleased by the Pope's embarrassment in dealing with this modernist than anxious to see Romanism reformed from within.

In the high affairs of Church and State the year 1868 was a great landmark. After a long debate Gladstone's Resolutions on Irish Disestablishment were carried against the Government on April 5. The discussions were followed closely in Punch's "Essence of Parliament," and two interesting points are brought out. Disraeli maintained that the House had no mandate, as we now say, to deal with the Irish Church. They ought not to be asked at eight days' notice to repeal the Union. On the other hand, Gladstone argued that it would be ultra-democratic, if not anarchic, to say that Parliament could not act without appeal to the constituencies. The Government were beaten by 328 votes to 272, but remained in office till the autumn, when they appealed to the country. By the return of a Liberal majority Gladstone was left free to introduce the first instalment of his scheme for pacifying Ireland. This view is clearly set forth in Punch's doggerel stanzas headed, "Out and In":-

Gone is Dizzy,

From the busy

Cares of State repose he can.

In comes Gladdy

Who of Paddy

Means to make a loyal man.

Punch acquiesced in the measure, but showed some anxiety lest it should be interpreted as a concession to Fenian intimidation. His cartoon, which bore the inscription "Justice to Ireland," shows the figure of Justice blindfolded, with sword and scales, enthroned in the background. In front and at her feet Gladstone, laying the Irish Church on a flaming altar, says: "This is a sacrifice to Justice, not to Papists or Assassins. And if they--" Turning their backs on him are a sulky-looking priest and a Fenian desperado levelling a gun. The Bill for Disestablishing and Disendowing the Irish Church was introduced by Gladstone on March 1, 1869. A month later Punch published another cartoon entitled, "Disendowment and Disarmament." Here a Fenian says to a priest: "Be jabers, your Riv'rence, it's spoilin' our thrade they are entirely"; and his Riv'rence replies: "Thrue for you, me boy." During the course of the debates the "Essence of Parliament" contains an entry with an unpleasantly familiar ring:-

Thursday (April 29). Another and another Irish murder. The desire of Members to know that the Government is doing something cannot be blamed. The Irish Secretary stated that the Executive would proceed with the utmost vigour, but deprecated the entering into details. There is a Ruffian called the Mayor of Cork, who has presided at a dinner to two of the released Fenian convicts, and who eulogized O'Farrell, who wounded the Duke of Edinburgh. Mr. Gladstone said that the fellow's language could not be too severely condemned.

A CHANGE FOR THE BETTER

Ghost of Queen Elizabeth: "Agreed, have they? Ods boddikins! Gads my life, and marry come up, sweetheart! In my time I'd have knocked all their addlepates together till they had agreed!"

John Bright, who had joined the administration as President of the Board of Trade, donned a court uniform and (if Punch is to be believed) actually danced a quadrille at a Court Ball with the Princess of Wales as partner, is applauded for his eloquence in the House and rebuked for his unbridled vehemence outside it. Ministers mustn't bully, but think of their colleagues. They must, in short, wear a muzzle, and if Bright could not bear to wear one, he certainly had no right, Punch argued, to be where he was. The debates in the Commons were fiery and protracted, and those who regarded the measure as one of confiscation secured important concessions, but the battle was really joined in the Upper House. Lord Derby maintained a non possumus attitude, but the eloquence of Magee (then Bishop of Peterborough) and the arguments of Cairns did not avail to prevent thirty-six Conservative Peers from voting with the Government. But, even so, the Lords' amendments threatened a constitutional crisis, only averted by the compromise arrived at by Granville and Cairns in July, 1869. The Bill became law and was put into operation on January 1, 1871. That Punch entertained misgivings as to its effect in encouraging intimidation may be gathered from his cartoon, "How not to do it," in which "Pat" threatens Britannia with unspeakable things if she does not release those noble patriots, the Fenian prisoners.

"Mr. Disraeli's Religion"

The prevalence of religious cant and snobbery and sensationalism is frequently chastised in the 'sixties and 'seventies. In the spring of 1866 Punch copies an advertisement in which a young man wished "to find a home with a pious family, where his Christian example would be considered sufficient remuneration for his board and lodging." And in January, 1870, he pilloried an even more glaring example of complacent and well-connected religiosity: "A Gentleman, born and bred, kinsman of an Earl ... will preach Christ." The infection of the pulpit by sensation is deplored in 1867 à propos of an announcement in the Islington Gazette:-

"Caledonian Road Chapel.-Next Sunday Sermons will be preached, afternoon, by Mr. Geo. B. Clarke, a Black Brother, from Jamaica, Son-in-law of the late excellent Paul Bogle. Evening, by Mr. Henry Varley the Butcher, from Notting Hill, whose 'words sink, like flame-tipped darts, into the souls of his hearers.'"

It is easy to make too much of isolated instances of self-conscious and self-advertising rectitude. There is far greater justification for the animated protest which Punch registered against the attempts made to discredit Disraeli at the time of his first Premiership on the score of his religion or irreligion. Disraeli had to some extent anticipated this criticism when in his first speech as Premier, on March 5, 1868, he said that he knew that in his position there were personal and peculiar reasons which would aggravate the burden and augment the difficulties. On this Punch made the following comment:-

People can interpret these words as they please. Those who give them a significance connected with birth, and who have intelligence enough to take a large view of pedigree, may note that they were uttered by a man descended from one of the Hebrew families expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, and who settled in Venice as merchants.

The campaign of curiosity met with no encouragement from Punch, who returned to the subject a few weeks later under the heading, "The Modern Inquisition":-

Perhaps the Premier, who has now got to make a Bishop of Hereford, will write one more letter and satisfy the British Booby on the subject of "Mr. Disraeli's Religion," which appears to afflict divers. Scarcely a day passes but some new conjectural impertinence, or some particularly unnecessary information is tossed out. Mr. Disraeli knows that Punch has not refrained from a great lot of good-natured allusions to the nationality of which the former is so justly proud; and it is possible that we may have many another cartoon of which he will be the smiling or scowling hero. But we protest-and we are as good a Protestant as Mr. Hardy-against sneaking into a gentleman's study, and taking notes as to whether Prayer Book, Missal, Watts's Hymns, Koran, or Shaster, be most thumbed, and publishing inferences. We do not see whose business it was to announce that Mr. Disraeli had no particular religion until he was five, and that he was then taken by Samuel Rogers to Hackney Church, especially as we believe the latter statement to be false, Mr. Rogers and his father having been regular attendants at the Unitarian Chapel at Hackney, of which the celebrated Dr. Price was, in older days, Minister. Nor do we see why the pastor of Hughenden should gratify vulgar curiosity by proclaiming that the Premier has been a regular Church-goer for seventeen years, and was a Communicant at Easter. Is this England or America? We do not habitually admire French legislation, but the late edict against ransacking Private Life is not without its merits. Somebody will be asking about our religion next, and will need all his own to bear the consequences.

In earlier years Punch, as we know, had overlooked Lord Shaftesbury's great services as a practical philanthropist in view of his Sabbatarianism. But he had learned to dissociate Lord Shaftesbury from the "snuffling sect" of Puritan killjoys, and in 1868 indulges in a eulogy of his Protestant zeal against Popery and Ritualism. The ballad on the insurrection in Spain, in the early winter of that year, shows no abatement of Punch's distrust of Romanism. The end of the Temporal Power in 1870 was welcomed as the logical, inevitable, and desirable consummation of Italian unity: it made Italy, not the Vatican, mistress of Rome, and it was in keeping with the consistent policy of the paper that the Pope's pretensions as a peace-maker in 1871 should be roughly disputed. England, it is claimed, was the true pacificator of Europe, and Professor (afterwards Sir John) Seeley's observations in "How to keep the Peace" suggest the possibility of a League of Nations.

The end of this period was marked by the passing of a great divine, a famous bishop and the greatest of missionaries. In the memorial verses printed on April 13, 1872, Punch recognized the true saintliness, the love of truth, the nobly righteous indignation of F. D. Maurice:-

The life of love he lived, the truth he spoke,

The seeds of good he sowed on earth remain.

In many brave hearts, eased from Evil's yoke,

The fruitful soul of Maurice lives again.

Incidentally it is noted that Maurice never received any preferment, bishopric, canonry, or deanery.

Wilberforce and Livingstone

The lines given below on Wilberforce, who is coupled with Lord Westbury, are largely inspired by the de mortuis note. The writer begins by recording the worst that had been said of both-the slyness of the sleek priest, the sneers and scorn and mincing tones of the bitter lawyer. But now we know better, and recognize that the dove was blended with the serpent in both:-

And so, Life's judgment set to right by Death's,

Lay busy Bishop and keen Judge to rest;

And, by their coffins, think with bated breaths,

How good the worst of us, how bad the best.

A PAN-ANGLICAN WASHING DAY

Chorus of Old Washerwomen: "There! Take'em away-we can't be worrited with them things."

"If the seventy-five members of the Pan-Anglican Synod have not a single word to say upon any of the great questions, theoretical or practical, which concern the very existence of the Church of England, their impotent caution and misplaced decency will do more to endanger it than any external attack with which it is at present threatened."-Pall Mall Gazette.]

Writing of Livingstone, always one of his heroes, Punch does not agree with the view that his was a wasted life, or that a greater work of reclamation was to be done at home, and applauds the unselfishness, fearlessness, and vision of one who died in sight of evening rest and honours fairly won:-

By their own scale great souls gauge things and men;

Their ways and weights are not our weights and ways;

Only their vision goes beyond our ken,

Reaching to larger lights-diviner days.

It was in this larger vision that Punch found the Church of England wanting, and when the first Pan-Anglican Synod met in 1867, he took as the text of his cartoon the acid comment of the Pall Mall Gazette just quoted.

The question of Public Worship Regulation was already in the air, though it did not lead to legislation until the return of the Conservatives to power. On July 12, 1873, Punch published a cartoon à propos of the protest against Ritualism and the Confessional. Mr. Miall, M.P., a leader of the Liberation Society, is shown with two archbishops expressing his delight to find them so earnestly co-operating with him for the destruction of the State Church. A fortnight later Punch complained that Dr. Thomson (the Archbishop of York) had misread the cartoon. What Punch really meant was to suggest that by neglecting the representations of real Churchmen, and by tolerating the antics of Ritualism, the hierarchy were playing into the hands of the Church's enemies. But he still hoped that the Archbishops would stiffen their backs and carry out the spirit of Tait's threat against those who brought their toys to church. So when Archdeacon Denison, who supported the Confessional, denounced certain Bishops for their ultra-Protestantism, Punch suggested that Denison's friends should present him with a triple cap (with bells).

[7] Within our own times the milking of cows on Sunday was objected to by Scottish Sabbatarians.

* * *

EDUCATION

The worst of education, as Peacock remarks, is that there is no beginning and no end to it. But the subject is set about with other pitfalls and difficulties. It is one of the most important things in life; its annals have been adorned by great and even heroic names; yet the calling has never been free from gibes at the dominie and the gerund-grinder. And again, by the irony of fate it has been responsible for an unconscionable amount of dull and pedantic and cranky literature. There is no greater benefactor than a good schoolmaster; there is no greater bore than the "Educationist." Punch, though a comic journal, has not escaped the infection in dealing with the subject, but it is to his credit that on the whole he has resisted the temptation to indulge in untimely facetiousness, and has not been afraid to be serious when the occasion demanded.

Contending zealots, assisted by Parliamentary apathy, had effectually barred the progress of national education throughout the period treated in the previous volume. But the awakening had begun in 1858, though more than twenty years were to pass before Forster's Act was placed on the Statute Book. The debate on the Paper Duty in June, 1858, showed, at any rate, that all parties were at one in condemning this tax. Disraeli, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, could not afford to remit it, but Punch read the signs of the times aright in his comment: "The House voted ￡563,435 for Educational purposes in order to qualify the people to read the books which the removal of the paper duty will place in their hands." It was reserved for Mr. Gladstone to make good this forecast. His famous series of Free Trade Budgets between 1859 and 1865 were quite as much the effect as the cause of national prosperity, but in 1865 "no one ventured to doubt Gladstone's financial omniscience. Everyone who paid less for his pound of tea or his newspaper could look upon him as a personal benefactor."[9]

The judicious use of opportunity rather than genius may have been the secret of Gladstonian finance; but no such reserves are called for in appraising the merits of the series of Acts dealing with national education passed during his first Premiership. If one needs a practical illustration of the immense advance made in education in ten years, one need only compare the provisions of the Act of 1870 with the account of what Punch calls an "anti-educational demonstration" in the Commons in July, 1860, when Palmerston was Prime Minister:-

There was a Bill for making it compulsory on the employers of the labour of children under twelve years old, to have a certificate that the child was learning to read and write, and had twenty hours of teaching per month-nothing like an hour a day. But so monstrous an Innovation frightened the House. Mr. Henley was pious, and said that people were not to eat unless they worked, but were not commanded to read and write; Mr. Buxton was humane, and said there were thousands of children too idle, wicked or stupid to learn, and their vested rights were not to be interfered with; Mr. Hardy took the old Tory view, and said that the children of the poor were taught quite enough to enable them to do the duties they were intended for; and Mr. Baynes, as a Dissenter, declared the Bill to be needless, and that the work of education was going on admirably. Yielding to these irresistible arguments, the Bill was thrown out, a majority of 122 to 51 deciding that the children of the English poor want no assistance in the battle with the World, the Flesh and the First Whig.

It was this debate, by the way, that prompted Punch to recall the derivation of Parliament by a French etymologist from the two verbs parler and mentir.

Education Act of 1870

A good beginning had been made with the Act providing efficient inspection of endowed and Grammar Schools in 1869, but the Elementary Education Act of 1870 was a measure of first-rate importance, which has affected our national life more vitally than any other passed in the last fifty years, unless we except the People's Representation Act of 1918. From the moment of its introduction Punch realized its far-reaching influence. On March 26, 1870, he published the cartoon, "The Three R's, or Better Late than Never." Here we see Forster addressing a group of small school children, town and country types: "Well, my little people, we have been gravely and earnestly considering whether you may learn to read. I am happy to say that, subject to a variety of restrictions, conscience clauses, and the consent of your vestries-you may!" The conflict that led to the final compromise is indicated by two groups in the background: one amicably gathered round John Bull; the other including a bishop, a coronetted peer, a sour-visaged minister of the Chadband type, and an austere female.

INCORRIGIBLE

Clerical Examiner: "What is your name?"

Incorrigible: "Biler, sir."

Clerical Examiner: "Who gave you that name?"

Incorrigible: "The boys in our Court, sir."

The issues involved are set forth in a "long and grave letter" addressed by Punch to "Master Gutterblood" in town, and "Master Chawbacon" in the country. Writing as their friend and well-wisher, sincerely anxious to see them properly taught, he deplores the obstacles hitherto put in their way by the "black-coats"-Parson, Priest and Nonconformist Minister. He applauds Forster's plan, and specially condemns the action of the secularizing party who would exclude all religion from schools, since the bulk of English people were in favour of some simple religious teaching:-

Those who are now barring your road to school are not the Churches, but those who insist that no Church at all shall have a hand in your teaching when you have got there. I have been accustomed to think that it was the Established Church's jealousy of the Dissenters that kept you ignorant, now it looks as if you were to be kept in the dark by the Dissenters' jealousy of the Established Church, working with those who distrust and dislike equally Church and Dissent, and all forms of religious Creed.

"OBSTRUCTIVES"

Mr. Punch (to Bull A.1): "Yes, it's all very well to say 'Go to school!' How are they to go to school with those people quarrelling in the doorway? Why don't you make 'em 'move on'?"

It was a fair summary of the opposing interests which clashed during the progress of the Bill through the House. Punch's impatience is shown in the further cartoon "Obstructives." "Those people" are a group of clerics of various Churches blocking the school doorway. A fortnight later Punch was able to announce in his "Essence of Parliament" that the very qualified compulsion proposed by Parliament had been approved by large majorities, and to publish his third cartoon on the solving of the problem. Master Forster (with his slate) is saying to Britannia, the Schoolmistress, "Please, M'm, I've done it, M'm." And when Britannia asks, "And how have you done it, William?" he replies, "Please, M'm, I've reduced all the fractions to the lowest common denomination." To this is added the stage direction "The good Boy enters the Cabinet." The Bill passed through both Houses, and when Parliament rose on August 10 and the Queen's Speech made special reference thereto, Punch comments, "Excuse us, your Majesty, but permit us to say 'Hooray!' and to add a cheer for Mr. Forster." He welcomed a measure which affirmed the principle that the State was bound to provide gratuitous instruction for all the children in the realm, but resented the educational luxuries which leading "Educationalists" were anxious to introduce. So we find a burlesque list of these fancy subjects, including hieroglyphics, croquet, bézique, etiquette, given in the following year with the remark: "There are people old-fashioned enough to think that it might be as well to give our poor neglected children only plain joints at first-the 3 R's-and let the entrées stand over for the present." The introduction of the "Fourth R"-Religion-prompted the "Educational Epigram" a year later:-

Milk is for babes, wrote one that knew.

Sectarian Educators, you

Who dogmas teach which Doctors question,

Are you not giving babes strong meat,

So much too tough for them to eat

The upshot must be indigestion?

THE CONSCIENCE CLAUSE

Rector's Wife: "And what's your father, my boy?"

Boy: "My father's a 'Hagitator,' an' he says he won't have me learnt no catechism, 'r else you'll all of yer 'ear of it!"

In the following summer we have a picture by Charles Keene of a beery working man protesting against temperance propagandism at schools, and resolving to withdraw his small son from the reach of these subversive doctrines, while humorous capital is made out of the "Conscience Clause" at the expense of the "agitator." The provision of gratuitous meals to elementary school children was not yet even mooted, but Punch strongly supported the philanthropists who in 1867 gave weekly dinner parties in Marylebone to seven or eight hundred children, following the example set by Victor Hugo during his sojourn in Guernsey.

Scene-Toy-shop. (Enter highly educated Youth of Twelve).-"Oh, I want some toy, or conjuring trick, or something that would do for an old gentleman of fifty or thereabouts; my grandfather, in point of fact,-you know the kind of thing. I dessay."

Children and their Tormentors

Turning to preparatory or boarding schools, we have to note that academies of the type of "Dotheboys Hall" had not altogether disappeared, to judge by the advertisement which Punch pilloried under the heading of "Children and their Tormentors":-

"Boarding Schools wanted, in London, for a boy, nine years, and two girls, six and seven years old, requiring firm discipline, having become wild and unruly, through neglect occasioned by family misfortunes. No holiday could be given, as holidays destroy any good effected at school. The father, quite a gentleman, can only pay 20 guineas each. This advertisement is only intended for schools of pre-eminent efficiency for such cases, and prosperous enough to be able and willing to accept such terms, and undertake the needed task of reformation for the sake of the schools' own additional credit of success. Particulars and references, by letter only."

As for its conducing to the "credit" of a school to help unnatural fathers thus to get rid of their children, surely no one but a squeers could indulge in such a thought. If through neglect at home, a child becomes unruly and requires to be "reformed," it is right that at a proper age it should be sent to school, if proper means are wanting for teaching it at home. But a girl of six years old can scarcely be so "wild" as to require, for her taming, utter banishment from home: nor can she be much bettered by being badly fed for twenty pounds a year, and, worse still, taught to grow up without knowing what "home" means.

The name of "gentleman" had been strangely taken in vain a year earlier, as we gather from an extract which sounds like an echo from The Fairchild Family:-

THE GAME OF JACK KETCH

On Saturday last a man named Thomas Edwards was hanged for murder at Liverpool, when, according to a report of the execution which appeared in the Daily Telegraph:-

"To the discredit of some person, a drag, containing gentlemen's children, was brought near the gallows."

Fine fun for gentlemen's children during the Christmas holidays, to see a man hanged. Just the spectacle to amuse little boys-but perhaps there were some little girls too among these gentlemen's children. Well, in that case, the gentlemen have taken a good step towards getting their girls, as well as their boys, off their hands. Nothing is more likely than that the juvenile spectators of Thomas Edwards' death-struggles will get to play at hanging, and effectually hang one another.

In 1868 Punch was exercised in mind by the pernicious influence on the ingenuous youth of "penny dreadfuls," and the activities of educational faddists. Precocious pedantry, as we show on the previous page, is satirized in 1863. There is a curious foreshadowing of Madame Montessori's hostility to fairy tales in Du Maurier's "Little Christmas Dream." Du Maurier had a genius for the delineation of nightmares, and in this picture he quite excelled himself. Earlier in the same year Punch made excellent capital, again with the aid of Du Maurier's pencil, out of Lord Malmesbury's statement that it was useless to teach modern languages at the public schools, "as parents can easily procure such instruction for their children by hiring foreign nurses." The artist depicts four disgusted Harrow boys, who have returned for the holidays, taking an educational walk with their German and French instructresses, while a young and untutored yokel looks on with grim amusement.

A LITTLE CHRISTMAS DREAM

Mr. L. Figuier, in the Thesis which precedes his interesting work on the World before the Flood, condemns the practice of awakening the youthful mind to admiration by means of fables and fairy tales, and recommends, in lieu thereof, the study of the Nature History of the World in which we live. Fired by this advice, we have tried the experiment on our eldest, an imaginative boy of six. We have cut off his "Cinderella" and his "Puss in Boots," and introduced him to some of the more peaceful Fauna of the pre-Adamite world, as they appear restored in Mr. Figuier's book. The poor boy has not had a decent nights rest ever since!

MALMESBURY NURSES

Lord Malmesbury considers that it is useless to teach modern languages at the Public Schools, "as parents can easily procure such instruction for their children by hiring foreign nurses." Observe the delight of four young gentlemen who have returned from Harrow for the holidays, and discover that their parents have procured French and German instruction for them. Also observe the envy of the young and untutored clown.

A notable landmark in the annals of preparatory and public school education is reached in 1869, when Punch quoted the following epoch-marking advertisement:-

"Grammar School, W-- R-- Wanted immediately, a Second Assistant Master, to teach thoroughly writing and arithmetic, also junior English subjects. Must be a good cricketer and round-arm bowler. Character to bear the strictest investigation. Salary ￡40, increasing to ￡60."

Punch on Co-Education

The resounding fame of W. G. Grace, who began his great career in first-class cricket in 1863, at the age of 15, and had just reached his majority, was doubtless responsible for this new educational departure. The salary was certainly not exorbitant, but the advent of the cricket-master moves no sympathy in Punch. He admits the force of the proverb that "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," but asks "does not Jack at some schools play a little to excess?" and speculates on the amazement which the schoolmaster abroad would feel in reading this announcement. On the other hand, over-pressure and "cramming" were equally distasteful to Punch, who was seriously perturbed by the sensational accounts given in 1870 of the breakdown of Woolwich candidates.

REAL EDUCATION

Mr. Punch is of opinion that a polite and easy bearing towards the opposite sex (tempered, of course, with propriety and discretion) cannot be inculcated at too early an age. He therefore recommends that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen, they should all be formally introduced to each other, and allowed to take their walks abroad in company.

Co-education had not yet emerged on the horizon of practical educational politics, and the plea put forward in a picture by Du Maurier for a mixed "crocodile" cannot be seriously entertained. The artist suggests that whenever an Institute for Young Ladies happens to meet an Academy for Young Gentlemen they should all be formally introduced to one another and allowed to take their walks abroad in company. The question of corporal punishment was raised by a lively correspondence in The Times, towards the close of 1872, on the Winchester practice of "tunding" with a ground-ash or cricket-stump. The action was general, the father of the boy whose punishment by a prefect had started the correspondence, the headmaster, Dr. Ridding, "in English less classical than queer," and sundry old Wykehamists all joining in. Punch was at first scandalized by the brutality with which the prefects exercised their disciplinary powers, but the spirit and good sense showed by the victim caused him to modify his view:-

His punishment, while he feels it unjust

He takes without blather or ban:

Yes, out of the lot who've kicked up a dust,

The boy is the Man.

At the beginning of the same year the invasion of the public schools by the new plutocracy, as described by a correspondent in the Morning Post, who assumed the unfortunate pseudonym of "Pavidus," impelled Punch to some outspoken comment. "Pavidus" complained that the standard in tips and pocket-money had been unduly raised by the young cotton-lords-boys who came back with ￡5 as a minimum. Punch finds the root of the evil in the perversion of the public schools from their original intention-to educate the sons of poor gentlemen-and suggests that if the "nobs" don't like their sons associating with young plutocrats, they should get up poor schools of their own and keep the high-bred paupers select. A similar situation has arisen since the war, but the difficulty has been solved without snobbery or squealing. Parents who cannot afford to send their sons to schools with which their families have been associated for generations, send them elsewhere, but they do not "make a song about it."

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Arthur (on pony): "Hollo! What have you got on your heads?"

Juvenile Swell: "Why, you see, every snob wears a cap or a wide-awake now; so the men of our school have returned to the old Chimney Pot!"

(As paterfamilias we are sorry to say that we have observed this monstrosity many times this Christmas.)

University Reform

There remain the Universities, the apex of the educational pyramid. The Universities Commission was not appointed till 1872. Its report on the income and property of Oxford and Cambridge was not published till October 1874, and the Universities' Act was not passed till 1877. Punch's contributions to the discussions which arose over University Reform nearly always take the form of hostile criticism of the champions of "no change," and he devotes by far the greater amount of space to the castigation of Oxford conservatives and non-resident reactionaries. The vote on the institution of the non-Collegiate or "unattached" system in 1868 furnished Punch with the materials for a comprehensive indictment of all his pet Oxford aversions. In the wail of the Medi?valists, headed "An Oxford Miserere," Punch ranges himself on the side of the reformers; Sir John, afterwards Lord Coleridge, who had taken an active part in the successful movement for the abolition of religious tests in the Universities; Conington, the distinguished Latinist and editor of Virgil; Raper, the well-known Fellow of Trinity College, who, under more than one President, was the power behind the throne; and Jowett, who with Stanley and Maurice, had always been supported by Punch in his espousal of "modernist" views.

When Mr. Meyrick, an Oxford Don, expressed his satisfaction that our Educational System was not that of the Germans, Punch was unable to echo his complacency, and went so far as to wish that "our Dons and Fellows were but as these Germans"; but it may be pleaded in extenuation of his offence that the doctrine of "Kultur" was less vocal in the 'sixties, and that German professors and teachers were not then so firmly harnessed to the car of "Machtpolitik." Punch little thought that some fifty years later Admiral Tirpitz would admit that the most formidable opponent of Germany was the "polo-playing Englishman." The notion that pastime was overdone finds vent in the "Chant for College Athletes":-

How doth the busy Undergrad

Improve each shining hour,

Loving each new athletic "fad"

To show his muscles' power!

* * *

In feats of strength and games of skill

His time must all be passed,

Heedless that, 'spite of cram, he will

Be sorely plucked at last.

Affluent College Servants

Over-athleticism, however, was not the only ground of complaint against education at the older Universities in the 'sixties. The high cost of living for undergraduates, owing to the extortion of local tradesmen and the perquisites of college servants, provoked a correspondence in The Times in the winter of 1865. Punch ironically affected to defend the retail "profiteers." His College butler in "The Undergraduates' Rebellion" associates himself with the College Dean as the victim of a mutiny of meanness, and the accompanying cartoon rubs in the point, a stout butcher addressing an equally stout Don, engaged in cutting a loaf, with the words, "Wery low them letters in the papers, Mr. Dean! Wery 'ard on both of us, Sir-my beef and your bread-an'-butter!" Punch's satire was justified by the fortunes notoriously made at the time and for many years afterwards by College cooks and butlers, whose incomes sometimes exceeded those of the Heads of Houses. More than ten years later a Christ Church "Scout" bitterly complained of the passing of the good old times. As he put it, "Instead of taking food home out of College, I has to bring it in."

* * *

[8] This probably refers to his work on the Epistles of St. Paul (1855).

[9] Oman's England in the Nineteenth Century, p. 155.

* * *

INVENTIONS, NOVELTIES AND FORECASTS

Railways, their dangers and inconveniences, continue throughout this period to furnish Punch with a never-ending theme of criticism and complaint; nor need we altogether wonder when it is remembered that it was not until 1861 that communication between guard and engine driver was established on the Eastern Counties Railway, and then at first only on express and fast trains;[10] and again, that it was not until 1873 that sleeping carriages were first introduced. The murder of Mr. Briggs by Müller on the North London line on July 9, 1864, created a scare amongst nervous passengers, which even the introduction of the corridor carriage has not altogether allayed. But, from the point of view of a Londoner, the most notable feature in railway development was the extension of intra-urban facilities which grew out of the Act of 1853, though the construction of the Underground did not begin till the spring of 1860, and it was not opened for traffic, in its original and limited range, till January, 1863. The completion of the Inner and the addition of the Outer Circle followed; the Swiss Cottage extension was not opened till 1868; but Highgate and many other suburbs remained isolated until the coming of the tubes.

The "Tuppenny Tube" was not opened till June, 1900, but nearly forty years earlier we read in Punch that "amongst the new railway projects, it seems there is to be a tubular underground from Regent's Circus to the Bank." The plea for cheap workmen's trains to the suburbs in the spring of 1870 only surprises us now by its having waited so long to be granted.

In the realm of imaginative forecast, one may note Du Maurier's nightmare picture of aerial trains to Paris in 1870, and the burlesque charter for an aerial railway company in 1872. But the project of a Channel tunnel had long been seriously considered, though the experimental borings were not made till 1876.[11] Ten years earlier Punch had indulged in some fantastic speculations on the result of the preliminary trials conducted by French and English engineers, with Sir John Hawkshaw at the head of the latter.

A patent for pneumatic tyres had been taken out in the 'forties; bicycles and tricycles came in at the end of the 'sixties; but twenty years were to elapse before the boneshaker and the "ordinary"-that wonderful and perilous machine-gave place to the "safety." In 1868 and 1869 references abound to velocipedes-the word "bicycle" had not yet established itself-and in the Almanack for 1869 there is a picture of a strange mechanism called the "Rantoone," a tricycle with two large wheels behind and a small guiding wheel in front. It is also mentioned in Henry Kingsley's Boy in Grey, and Crawley's Manly Games for Boys. But the bicycle, as we know it, the most momentous addition to the resources of locomotion between the coming of the steam engine and the advent of the petrol-driven motor, was only looming in the future; it was little more than a plaything in the period under review.

THE RANTOONE

The Cover Side. 10.45 a.m. Spriggins comes up with the Hunt on his favourite "Rantoone."

10.50. "For'ard Away!" Spriggins gets along famously.

10.55. "Tally-Ho!" Spriggins realizes the sensation of being "run away with."

10.56. "Yoicks!" Spriggins learns what a "cropper" means.

11.56. Five miles from everywhere.

Telegraph wires first began to spread their overhead network in London in 1859; the District Telegraph Company was started in 1860. Ten years later Punch celebrates the reduction of the fee for a twenty-word telegram to one shilling. Of the use of telegraphy in war he expressed considerable scepticism, on the ground that it would lead to endless contradictory rumours.

AWFUL SUMMUT

That Tummas met as he was a-comin' whoam-"Ta looked like a man a ridin' 'pon nawthin'!"

The Atlantic Cable

The most notable advance in telegraphy, however, was that of the long-distance cables. The year 1858 abounds in references to the second and third attempts to span the Atlantic. Frequent failures delayed the achievement of the enterprise for several years. In 1865 Punch published a series of reports purporting to come from the Great Eastern, then engaged in laying the cable, but it was not until the summer of 1866 that he was able to record the completion of the task:-

A Parliamentary week never ended with a more gratifying incident. A Minister, Mr. Hunt, stated that the Atlantic Telegraph had been laid to America, an ex-Minister, Mr. Childers, confirmed the fact, and an Honourable Member held in his hand a signal that had just arrived. Mr. Punch instantly sent Mr. Johnson a peremptory signal to liquor severely.

Undoubtedly the record of the marvels of applied science kept by Punch, and the forecasts of further extension in which he indulged, come home to us more closely in connexion with inventions for use in warfare. The unrealized projects of Captain Warner have been described in the previous volume. A liquid-fire bomb or incendiary shell, and an incendiary rifle-bullet attracted attention early in 1859. But the lessons of the American War of 1861-1865 gave Punch occasion to think sometimes seriously, and even with flashes of remarkable insight, on the possibilities of future warfare. His old distrust of armoured ships as "ferreous freaks" was not entirely dispelled by the triumph of the monitor; he gives us a picture of a new iron-clad mistaken for a Noah's Ark, and speaks of the new types as flat-irons. He admits that the action between the Merrimac and the Monitor conclusively proves that one iron-clad ship is a match for several wooden ships carrying more and heavier guns; but if there are to be no ships of war but iron ships, and iron ships are mutually shot-proof, he is impelled to the further conclusion that naval war in the future may end in an inconclusive stalemate:-

Ships being rendered practically invulnerable, any two vessels of war belonging to hostile nations will, hereafter, meeting on the high seas, each find itself unable to injure the other and therefore be obliged to part in peace, the result of their collision having been as nearly as possible the opposite to that of the conflict between the Kilkenny Cats.

From such a prospect Punch professes to derive hope; but there is more sagacity in the "Farewell to the Fleet" which followed three weeks later, a valediction which in its last stanza crudely anticipates the pre-and post-war warnings of Admiral Sir Percy Scott:-

Now farewell, my trim three-decker,

Sails and spars and all farewell;

Iron's proved of wood a wrecker,

Where 'twill steer us who can tell?

In glorious Nelson's days, d'ye mind them,

Our tars were sailors every inch:

Stout hearts, with pigtails stout behind them,

And ne'er a man to skulk or flinch.

But now-my dear eyes! British sailors

Half soldiers and half stokers are;

And if we manned the fleet with tailors,

'Twould in a month be fit for war.

* * *

Bomb-proof, hull-sunk, iron-roofed, we steam on,

Nor ball nor boarder fear we now;

And when our foe we run abeam on,

He sinks at once beneath our prow.

Them Yankee swabs, from shot a-shrinking:

Fight under water, so they tells;

Dear eyes! our Navy soon, I'm thinking,

Will be a fleet of diving bells.

THE "BRITISH TAR" OF THE FUTURE

The Navy of the Future

But by far the best illustration of the way in which the course of the war caused Mr. Punch to think furiously, fantastically, but by no means foolishly, is to be found in the fantasy headed, "A Flying Island wanted":-

Will somebody please invent for us an Island of Laputa?

It would save a mint of money in plated ships, and Armstrong guns, and Shoeburyness experiments. Although we are at peace, a most expensive war is raging between gunmakers and shipbuilders, and so far as one can learn, there seem but little hopes of stopping it. First the guns will gain the day, and then the ships will be built stronger until they are ball-proof, then bigger guns will come, and then still stronger ships; and so the battle will go on, and victories alternately be won by either side, and the Queen's powder be burnt at a most tremendous rate, so long as Mr. Bull agrees to stand the shot.

If the Invention War goes on much longer than it has done, we quite expect to hear of the construction of a cannon that shall throw a ball as big as the Ball upon St. Paul's, and of a mortar that shall pitch a shell as large round as the dome. Indeed, we fancy that in course of time conical shot will equal the Big Pyramid of Egypt, and that guns will be invented of sufficient power to throw such shot across from Brighton to Boulogne.

Now, if somebody would just invent a Flying Island, and present us with the patent, this costly fight between artillerists and shield-makers would probably soon cease. There would be no need then of our Army and our Navy, our big guns and our block ships, our field pieces and forts. Whenever any nation dared to pick a quarrel with us, all that we should have to do would be to let our Flying Island drop upon their heads, and squash their fleets and forces flat at one fell swoop.

The development of long-range artillery has fulfilled Punch's fancy. And we have become a flying island; but, unfortunately, the power of swooping from the skies is shared by other countries. As for ascents into the upper air, it was in the same year (1862) that the long unbroken record in altitude was made by Coxwell and Glaisher in the old-fashioned balloon. There is a reference to the Aeronautical Exhibition held at the Crystal Palace in 1868; but the disaster which befell the Belgian, de Groof, in July, 1874, while attempting to descend from a balloon in a newly invented parachute, elicited a decidedly obscurantist comment:-

DE GROOF

(Killed in attempting to Fly, July 9, 1874)

He who provides for all beneath the sky,

Made men to walk, as He made birds to fly;

Then let man stick to earth, and have the sense

Not to fly in the face of Providence!

The Coming of the Typewriter

Cigarettes had come in with the Crimean War. In 1858 Punch suggested an improved passport with a photograph. To the same year belong the introduction of the word "dipsomaniac," spirit-drawing (a forerunner of spirit-photographs), Punch's first mention of Schweppe's soda water and of synthetic substitutes for food, and his prediction of the formation of a Camel Corps. Aerated bread, and the magnetic hair brush-supposed to restore the pigment to grey hair by drawing out the iron in the blood-were among the novelties of 1860; hair-brushing by machinery was introduced in 1864, and the sewing machine makes its debut in Punch in 1866. An even more epoch-making invention, which ranks among the most momentous products of the age in its far-reaching results on commerce, journalism, literature and the whole social system, was the type-writer, exhibited in London in 1867:-

GOOD NEWS FOR BAD WRITERS

It is surprising what discoveries are made in the dead season. Here is one, for instance, the account of which has recently been snipped out by the scissors of many a sub-editor:-

"Writing superseded. Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a typewriting machine, lately exhibited to the London Society of Arts, which is said to print a man's thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process. By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonized paper, which is moved by the same manipulation."

Every author his own printer! What a happy state of things! No more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens; no more labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work will be in future merely play-on the piano. The future Locke may write his essays by a touch upon the keys.

In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry, or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper, and issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclop?dia complete within a month.

On the whole, this is not a bad though fantastic summary of the possibilities of a machine which, whatever its influence on the manufacture of novels, the multiplication of unnecessary books, and the art of letter-writing, has at least proved a wonderful time-saver and revolutionized the prospects of the "superfluous woman." In spite of its terrible ticking, it has proved a great lubricator of life; and, à propos of lubricants, we have to note the advent in the early 'seventies of synthetic butter, under its modern name:-

There are probably very few members of that generally bread-and-butter-eating community, the British Public, who have not frequently partaken, without knowing it, of the article described in the following extract from a letter of the Morning Post's Correspondent at Paris:-

"Butter, like all alimentary substances, has vastly increased in price. An enterprising merchant exhibits what he calls 'Produit nouveau, Margarine Mouriès, rempla?ant le beurre pour la cuisine. Economie incontestable sur le beurre; il co?te moitié moins cher, et on en use moitié moins.' This butter is made from the fat of beef, and costs 10d. per pound."

In merry England, however, this article does not merely replace Butter for the kitchen, but also for the breakfast-parlour, where it is eaten, not under the name of Margarine, in bread-and-margarine, but that of Butter, in bread-and-butter. It is bought for Butter, and it is sold for Butter; only the buyer believes it to be what it is sold for, whereas the seller well knows that it is a product of beef-suet; and he serves his customer with the latter commodity at the price of the former. The "enterprising merchant" of Paris, who sells Margarine as a substitute for Butter, and does not sell his customers by selling it as Butter, and at Butter's value, has very likely found honesty to be the best policy. That policy might, perhaps, be adopted with advantage by an enterprising British Cheesemonger.

Beef-fat is, we fear, a euphemism for the principal ingredient in the synthesis of margarine as originally compounded, and it was a consciousness of this fact that more than anything else prompted the dishonesty of the British cheesemonger.

The list of useful novelties may be completed with postcards, which date from the year 1870. Punch recognized their drawbacks, and recommended people who used them to write in cypher or in Greek characters, which was less a counsel of perfection fifty years ago than it would be to-day.

England's debt to America in the domain of invention was not confined to mechanical labour-saving appliances. The inventiveness of the American journalist repeatedly extorts the reluctant admiration of Punch from 1857 onwards. In the summer of 1858 he culls a gorgeous example of the high art of sensational reporting from a New York paper in which it was stated that six people were butchered by a man who blew his brains out, yet "at the latest date all the sufferers were in a fair way of recovery." Yet in their own way the English penny-a-liners were capable of fine work. In December of the same year Punch quotes the following from the account of an agricultural show in a daily paper:-

"Yesterday the gold medal pen of pigs was denuded of one of its finest specimens, one of those most extraordinary animals having expired from its obesity during the previous night. There were other demises from apoplexy amongst the porcine confraternity during the show."

The Press Surpasses Itself

It was in the Victorian age, again-though unknown to Punch-that the reporter of an Irish paper concluded his description of a burglary with the words, "after a fruitless search, all the money was recovered except one pair of boots." But the supremacy of the New World in this field was conclusively established in the year 1869, the annus mirabilis for ever memorable by its association with the greatest of all American advertisements. Fragments of this classic are familiar even to the present generation, but we are, thanks to Punch, able to give the original text in its entirety:-

Among those of our institutions that are especially getting Americanized is a part of our Press, professing to afford us information which it calls "reliable" and also abounding in announcements on which we may rely if their phraseology strikes us as the language of truth and honesty. Some of these notifications are formed on models, whereof a contemporary quotes an example:-

"A wonderful Medicine. The following advertisement is from a recent issue of a New York paper:-'If you want a really pure unsophisticated "family pill," buy Dr. R--'s liver-encouraging, kidney-persuading, silent perambulator-twenty-seven in a box. This pill is as mild as a pet-lamb, and as searching as a small tooth-comb. It don't go fooling about, but strictly attends to business, and is as certain as an alarm clock.'"

Puffery, resembling, if not quite equalling, that above instanced, in wit and humour, is fast gaining ground among us. America has taught us how to advertise. Thank Barnum. We have been, and are continuing to be, Americanized. We are progressing.

SCIENCE APPLIED TO ART

Angelina Squills (the doctor's daughter) by a judicious use of her father's stethoscope, is able to detect and enjoy the delicate tenor voice of the interesting young curate who lodges next door.

One is glad that Punch recognized the "wit and humour" of this unique document, though he says nothing of its magical choice of words. Dr. R-- was Dr. Rumbold. But whether or no he composed the advertisement I have not been able to discover-or, indeed, anything about him. Perhaps it was his swan-song; like the Old Masters, who according to Artemus Ward executed the execrable paintings exhibited at his lecture as their crowning and final achievement: "they did them and then they died."

The Next Generation

Sufficient materials have already been accumulated to enable the reader to form an estimate of Punch's credentials as a prophet or "intelligent anticipator." They would not, however, be complete without the "Forecast of the Next Generation" which appeared in 1872, and which is interesting not so much from its prophecies as from its comprehensive catalogue of Victorian shortcomings, failings and abuses:-

The next generation will possess an army properly clothed.

The next generation will all be able to read and write.

The next generation will wear light clothes in summer.

The next generation will remove some of the public-statues and edifices which their predecessors have erected.

The next generation will find life supportable without so many Vestries.

The next generation will not make calls.

The next generation will ride to and fro in decent cabs.

The next generation will have other sorts of fish in daily consumption besides red herrings.

The next generation will speak French and German, and, possibly, know something of their own language and literature.

The next generation will not wear high black hats in the month of July.

The next generation will see the officers of the army walking about the streets in uniform.

The next generation will have other public places of amusement open to them on Sundays, besides public-houses.

The next generation will be better cooks.

The next generation will have no theatres with fees.

The next generation will leave the table with the ladies.

The next generation will not avoid Hotels.

The next generation will find they can get on pretty comfortably without the Lord Privy Seal, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the Judge Advocate General, etc.

The next generation will not be ashamed of Leicester Square.

The next generation will be able to cross the Channel with less bodily discomfort.

The next generation will journey by railway more safely and more punctually.

The next generation will still have the National Debt, duns, dentists, domestics, humbugs, quacks, impostors, absurd fashions, adulteration, swindlers, and the Income Tax.

* * *

[10] In January, 1868, reference is made to carriages with circular holes between the compartments in order to facilitate communication.

[11] The scheme was originally proposed by a French engineer named Mathieu in the very beginning of the century, and taken up in 1833 by Thomé de Gamond, who worked at it for more than twenty years until an International Committee was formed. Operations were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War, but resumed in earnest in 1872. M. de Gamond died in poverty in 1876.

* * *

LONDON

Foul State of the Thames

Though nothing comparable to the Hausmannizing of Paris by systematized and uniform reconstruction was accomplished in London in the mid-Victorian period, great changes and improvements were introduced. Bridges were built, the river was partially purified and the Thames Embankment carried out. The state of the "ancient river, shining as he goes, mail-clad in morning to the ancient sea" of Henley's phrase, was a hideous scandal in the 'fifties. Father Thames may on occasion have appealed to the eye, but he continually affronted the nose. In 1858 the growth of London was estimated to reach 5,816,900 by 1901. Yes, says Punch, but what if the Thames is not purified? In June of that year the nuisance, aggravated by a dry summer, was painfully brought home to legislators in session at Westminster. Constant protests were raised in both Houses, and when Lord John Manners asserted that the Central Board of Works stopped the way, Punch would have liked to see Thwaites-the chairman-and his "gabbling colleagues" committed to prison until they had purged their contempt for our river.

A month later the drought and the bad drainage produced a regular panic, and on July 15 Disraeli introduced a Bill authorizing the cleansing of the Thames and giving the Board of Works power to raise a special rate (which Punch called the Stinking Fund) and a free hand in construction. The stench of the river continued to inspire a succession of poems, paragraphs and articles throughout the rest of the year, including an address to the Thames (after Tennyson), and beginning,

Bake, bake, bake,

O Thames, on thy way to the sea!

And I would that thy stink could poison

A Bishop, Peer or M.P.

The subsequent discontinuance of these tirades is a tolerably safe indication that the nuisance was being seriously grappled with. Eight years later, in the autumn of 1866, Father Thames, though still a disreputable figure, is allowed by Punch to use the tu quoque argument against a Parliamentary critic at a time when electoral corruption was calling loudly for reform.

BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION

Hon. Member (on Terrace of Parliament Palace): "O, you horrid, dirty old river!"

Father Thames: "Don't you talk, Mister Whatsyername! Which of us has the cleaner hands, I wonder?"

The new suspension bridge in St. James's Park is attacked in 1857 for its ugliness. "We can't make a monument, and now it seems we can't make a bridge." The new erection is described as a grotesque failure, but at least the ornamental water had been purified. Punch was more hopeful of the new Blackfriars Bridge, built by Cubitt, when he attended the ceremony of laying the foundation-stone in July, 1865, and when it was opened in November, 1869-just a hundred years after the opening of Mylne's bridge-he celebrated the event in an imaginary dialogue between the Queen, Mr. Cubitt and Dr. Johnson. The introduction of Johnson was thoroughly appropriate, for the doctor had attacked Mylne's bridge, or the "Pitt Bridge," as it was originally called, as contravening sound principles of engineering, and events proved that he was right. Over the new Westminster Bridge, begun in May, 1854, and opened at 4 a.m. on the morning of May 24, 1862-the day and hour on which Queen Victoria was born-Punch abandoned his pessimism, pronounced Page's design beautiful, and scouted the suggestion of a fussy M.P. who wished to have palisades erected to prevent would-be suicides from jumping over. It was this bridge to which another M.P., Sir W. Fraser, was anxious that the name Sebastopol should be attached.

London Statues

Statues are a subject of mixed comment, mostly unflattering. But a good point was scored in 1858 at the expense of Tom Duncombe, the eccentric Radical M.P. and man of fashion, who was incensed at the erection of a statue to Jenner in Trafalgar Square, and sneered in the House at the "Berkeley cow-pox-doctor":-

Mr. Punch cannot conceive what the veteran dandy Tom was thinking about. Could he be aware that the discovery of vaccination, which has saved myriads on myriads of lives, and which Parliament rewarded, in 1802 and 1807, with grants of ￡10,000 and ￡20,000, has the still higher merit of preserving a face from ravages very inimical to lady-killing?

The Guards' Memorial, unveiled in February, 1861, is only faintly praised:-

It is no worse and perhaps it is a trifle better than the many statuesque caricatures that, in the name of Art, are supposed to adorn our much-abused London. The truth is, that the English sculptors have already displayed such a cruel affection for the Metropolis, that it has been quite a spoiled child with them.

When a fine memorial was made, we were not able to keep it; and Punch greatly regrets in 1873 that Foley's statue of Outram, temporarily erected in Waterloo Place before its removal to India, was not allowed to remain there, as it was "the finest statue, the only fine statue ever erected in London." Punch, however, had forgotten that ten years earlier he had applied the epithet "fine" to Joseph Durham's statue of the Prince Consort in the Royal Horticultural Society's garden.

But of all London statues the most unfortunate and the most ignominiously treated was that of George I in Leicester Square. The Square throughout the 'sixties was a standing eyesore; an unkempt wilderness, where garbage of every kind was shot. The dilapidated condition of the statue in 1865 harmonized with its dingy surroundings and prompted a parody of Cowper:-

I am Monarch of all I survey,

My right leg is minus a foot,

My left has been taken away,

And another they haven't yet put.

In the "Lay of Leicester Square" Punch, after a survey of the great days of Leicester House, where "Prince Fred 'gainst Bubb Dodington once held the stakes," describes its lamentable condition at the moment he wrote:-

In dirt and neglect Soho's Slums I outvie

Than my seediest foreigner seedier am I.

Things had come to such a pass that "well bred spectres" no longer could haunt Leicester Square:-

I, Leicester Square garden, so called from the days

When my beds were made, shrubs pruned, and grass duly mown,

In my dirt and disorder maintain the old ways-

While my leg-less lead King, from his war-horse o'erthrown,

Proclaims in his downfall that highest of laws,

"Vested rights are still rights, whate'er nuisance they cause."

Later on in the year there is a cartoon aimed at Ayrton, the unpopular Chief Commissioner of Works in which "Ayrton the (B)?dile" is shown pointing to the battered statue from which the figure of the rider had been removed, and saying "Ha! Now that's a style of Art I flatter myself I really do understand."

From this derelict condition Leicester Square was rescued by the enterprise and munificence of Baron Albert Grant, whose chequered career was largely redeemed by an act which gave us the Square as we know it. Under the heading, "Grant in Aid and a Check that wants Crossing," Punch gratefully records his intervention and the difficulties which delayed the execution of the scheme.

The greatest of all the improvements that belong to this period was the Thames Embankment, which had formed part of Wren's scheme for the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Not until nearly two hundred years had elapsed was Parliamentary sanction obtained for carrying out the plan. It was vigorously opposed in the House of Lords by the Duke of Buccleuch, and Punch, on July 5, 1862, published a cartoon with the heading, "Sawney stops the way." John Bull, driving a bus labelled "Embankment," is confronted by a fully armed and kilted Scottish chieftain waving a banner inscribed, "Buccleuch and No Thoroughfare," while Punch as conductor remarks, "Drive on, John; never mind the Scotchman." John Bull drove on, and early in August, 1868, Punch celebrated (though somewhat ironically) the completion of the footway opening of the Embankment from Westminster to Essex Street. As Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who was responsible for the plans and their execution, was engineer to the Metropolitan Board of Works, Punch could not resist the opportunity for ridiculing his old bête noire Sir John Thwaites, the chairman, and his colleagues, the feu de joie loosed off by a sergeant and two bombardiers R.A., and the subsequent junketings at Woolwich. The Victoria Embankment from Blackfriars to Westminster was not opened to the public till 1870, the Albert Embankment on the south side from Westminster Bridge to Vauxhall in the same year; while the Chelsea Embankment from Battersea Bridge to Chelsea Bridge was finished in 1874. Taken together they constitute the greatest addition to the amenities of London made in our time, to say nothing of the reclamation of swamp and slime from the river and their conversion into what is perhaps the finest roadway in London. Cleopatra's Needle was originally presented to England by Mehemet Ali in 1819. Engineering difficulties stood in the way of its removal from Egypt for nearly sixty years. The question is discussed by Punch in 1869, but it was not till 1877 that the munificence of Sir Erasmus Wilson and the skill of John Dixon solved the problem of its transportation to its present site.

UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

Old Lady: "Well, I'm sure no woman with the least sense of decency would think of going down that way to it."

London Railways

Punch had no regrets when the old Hungerford Market (built in 1680, rebuilt in 1831), an unsuccessful rival to Covent Garden, was swept away in 1862 to make room for the new Charing Cross Terminus. But he was at best a lukewarm supporter of the extension of London railways, underground and suburban. The progress of the excavations and the "horrible mess" in the New Road, elicited a growl at the "Underground" and the delays in the construction of the "Sewer Railway." It was suggested that Dr. Cumming had found out that the opening of the line would bring on the end of the world before the date he had fixed for that catastrophe; that garrotters had found the excavations a convenient hiding-place, and so forth. Blundering, jobbing, squabbling, and litigation are also assigned as reasons for delay. In the following year, 1863, protests against further extensions of the underground trains reach a climax, and Punch denounces the vandals who want to ravage Sloane Square and Regent Street. In particular the viaduct crossing Ludgate Hill roused his indignation, and the anti-utilitarian point of view is maintained in the illustration of the "Highly ornamental tank" with which the railway company proposed to block out the view of St. Paul's, while the issue of Stanford's Railway Map of London is made the occasion of a vehement tirade against the devastation of London: "The railway man shall not be monarch of all he surveys." Punch, we may add, admitted the decrease in railway accidents, but attributed it to the pressure of public opinion and the penalties exacted from companies for negligence in safeguarding passengers from loss of life and limb.

Eheu Fugaces!

The pulling down of historic buildings or the removal of historic landmarks invariably moved Punch to regret or indignation. He cordially approved, it is true, of the relief of the Park Lane block in 1864 by the cutting of Hamilton Place, and the removal of the narrowest and most dangerous bottle-neck in the streets of London. And he acquiesced in the removal of Charterhouse School to the country in the interests of the boys, publishing, without fully endorsing, the arguments of those who prophesied that in its new surroundings the school would come to be known as Magna Charterhouse. But in general he lamented the demolitions and destructions which accompanied the triumphal march of commerce. Even the dismantling of the Colosseum in Regent's Park in 1868 evoked a melodious lament:-

I remember, I remember,

When I was a little boy,

How I came home in December

My fond parents to annoy.

But my pretty maiden Aunty

Was kind and gave to me

A sort of show galanty

A funny thing to see.

I remember, I was taken

By my Aunt's peculiar cabby,

For to hear the rafters shaken

By the Choir in the Abbey.

Nor the service, nor Te Deum

Nor the sights of Christmas time,

Could approach the Colosseum,

Save, perhaps, the Pantomime.

I remember, I remember,

All those Ruins in the grounds,

And the classic broken pillars

(Sold for something like three pounds.)

And the statues! One of Jason

Was a noble work of art;

They were knocked down to a mason,

Who removed them in his cart.

A little less than a year later a similar note is sounded when an announcement appeared advertising the sale of the "Supper Colonnade" at Vauxhall "to be sold cheap, a remnant of the past which has witnessed many a scene of merriment with lords and ladies of high degree." The disposal of relics, even dignified relics, has often been a problem to administrators. Parliament debated in 1860 what was to be done with the Duke of Wellington's funeral car, and it was ultimately stowed away in the crypt of St. Paul's. The old "Star and Garter" at Richmond was burned down in January, 1870, and Punch was moved to a poetic valediction in the name of the old frequenters who associated it with the days of their courtship. The doom of Temple Bar was pronounced in the same year, but Punch admits that those who lamented its doom were in "a small and mouldy minority." But there are no reserves in the protest uttered in 1871 against the pulling down of the City churches registered under the heading of "The Pick-axe Age":-

Go ahead, Gentlemen Governors. Pull down any secular building that seems to be in the way, and, as Sir Epicure Mammon says,

"Now and then a Church."

Temple Bar is doomed. Now Mr. Lowe wants to destroy the Church of St. Clement Danes, where Dr. Johnson used to worship. All right. St. Mary-le-Strand is an obstruction to vans and drays. Let us erase that. More room is wanted in Trafalgar Square, especially as Mr. Bruce hands it over to legislators of the rough kind; down with St. Martin. Then, though St. Margaret's has historical reminiscences, especially of Commonwealth days, and gives scale to the Abbey, there would be room for a large grass-plot for the people, with Ayrton-statues, were St. Margaret's invited to remove. The Abbey itself suggests an extinct superstition, and its architecture insults that of the Houses; do we want the Abbey? Then, what a splendid sweep for the carriages of the "self-made men of the City," civic knights, and the like, if St. Paul's Cathedral no longer blocked the road from Cheapside to Ludgate Hill! Go ahead, Gentlemen Governors. We can't do much in the way of building up fine things, but we are out-and-outers at knocking them down.

Historic Landmarks

And he returns to the charge a few months later in an ironical plea for the destruction of Wren's churches-St. Mildred's, Poultry; St. Dionis, Backchurch; St. James's, Aldgate; St. Martin's, Outwich, and St. Antholin's, Sise Lane. "Sir Christopher's Cathedral, as it is also a mausoleum, will probably be spared until some railway or tramway shall want the site." When the destruction of Northumberland House was projected in 1873 Punch, in a fit of feudal enthusiasm, deplored the vandalism and commercialism of the Philistine Board of Works, and pointed out that there was still time to save the time-honoured house of the Percys. When the demolition was carried out in the following year, and the lion was removed to Syon House, he was consoled by the reflection that it would be at least out of the reach of ignoble and mean-minded vandals. On the other hand, he had rejoiced greatly when in 1866, as the result of a deputation headed by Lord Stanhope and Dean Stanley, Parliament voted a sum of ￡7,000 for the restoration of Westminster Chapter House. In 1873 St. John's Gate, Clerkenwell, an inn which had been a favourite resort of Johnson, Garrick and "Sylvanus Urban," was taken over by the order of St. John of Jerusalem, and Punch compares the public spirit of these Templars favourably with the zeal of the "good Templars" whom he regarded as fussy fanatics. There was no controversial acrimony, however, in his plea for the preservation of the Tabard Inn, Southwark, and the poem "For the Tabard" was written by one who had not merely read but loved his Chaucer.

THE SMALL BORE MAN. WIMBLEDON, 1863

Boisterous Relative: "Hullo! Gus, my hearty, why I haven't seen you for ages! How are you? Give us your hand, my--"

Gus (alarmed): "Hoy! Keep off! Keep back, stand o' one side! Don't come near me-- How d'e do. Glad 'see you, but keep off at present, will you-- I've just adjusted my sights!"

The preservation of the amenities of London and the suburbs found a strong champion in Punch. We note a change of temper in 1864 in his comment on the rowdy behaviour of members of the "lower classes" who frequented St. James's Park, and the suggestion that it should be renamed "St. Giles's." In earlier days Punch had warmly resented the exclusion of working-men in fustian from this same park. But no class prejudice impairs his satisfaction in November, 1864, when Wimbledon Common was preserved for the nation and the "small bore man" by the good offices of Lord Spencer:-

WIMBLEDON PRESERVED

There is for us, and shall be, one retreat,

If but that only one, saved stucco-free,

Wimbledon, evermore for pilgrims' feet

Kept sacred, noble Spencer, thanks to thee!

Thy generous charter gives us scope to flee

Still thither from the hubbub and the heat.

In the following year he appeals to other Commons-Wandsworth, Barnes and Streatham-to follow the lead of Wimbledon, and when in 1866 Victoria Park was threatened with the erection of the Imperial Gas Company's works, Punch wrote:-

Let Companies shape their projects to scrape

Up wealth, and dividends share,

But dim their eyes if ever they tries

To rob a poor man of fresh air.

Alexandra Palace Destroyed

When the Alexandra Palace on Muswell Hill was opened in the summer of 1873, its gardens, statues and catering were praised in a welcome to "Alexandra" after the manner of the Laureate. Two days after this welcome appeared, the new Palace was destroyed by fire, and on July 5, 1873, Punch rather cruelly published a review of a poem composed on the event by Joseph Gwyer, potato-salesman of Penge. A few of the stanzas are worth rescuing from oblivion if only for their artless simplicity:-

On Muswell Hill there lately stood,

The Alexandra Palace great and good,

Both to our own and foreign land,

It claimed from each a prestige grand.

With works of art it did abound,

Which were wont the ignorant to astound,

The sightly dome for miles was seen

Surrounded by the pastures green.

But on the 9th of June the palace caught on fire,

Each moment seemed to send the flames much higher,

Flinging around with consternation spell

Such sad results as no mortal could foretell.

The shouts of alarm at this dread afray

Many were stricken and did prostrate lay,

As if they'd been wounded by some deadly foe,

So painful was the unexpected great blow.

While some were witnessing this awful view,

Others were anxious as to what they should do,

Some it was seen appeared quite romantic,

While the poor stall-girls seemed nearly frantic.

* * *

In two short hours it was a blaze

Which took some years to build and raise

Grand Alexandra's noble Dome,

Alas! all vanished the Ninth of June.

The Pantheon, mentioned in the previous volume, though shorn of its early glories, was still a feature of London in the 'sixties, and "Jack Easel," in January, 1862, describes a visit to the Pantheon, "once dedicated to the Tragic Muse, now a temple of all the gods," combining a bazaar, an aviary and a picture gallery, chiefly frequented by ladies-"Belindas in Balmorals." The pictures were a very mixed lot, including King Alfred and the Cakes, Act?on, and the Dead Body of King Harold. But the Pantheon in its last days was chiefly remarkable for an assemblage of wondrous knick-knacks, cheap bijouterie, antique vases, antimacassars, Buhl caskets, bonbonnières, china candlesticks, cheese-cakes, daguerreotypes, decanters, Gothic go-carts, German glass, rag dolls and ratafia.

Tattersall's

Of more robust interest is the elegy in April, 1865, on the "Transit of Tattersall's," when the old mart for selling horses in Grosvenor Place at the side of St. George's Hospital, founded by "Old Tatt," was pulled down and a move made to Knightsbridge Green. "Old Tatt," originally studgroom to the Duke of Kingston, leased the premises at Hyde Park Corner from the Earl of Grosvenor in 1766, set up as a horse auctioneer, and founded his fortunes by the purchase for ￡2,500 of the famous racer Highflyer from Lord Bolingbroke:-

Good bye, old Corner, where so long

Turf swells have loved to band,

Since first old Tatt his broad-brimmed hat

Showed in the well-known stand.

Where, ninety years of hopes and fears,

And nine to back of that,

The sporting swell with nags to sell

Still found a Tit for Tatt.

* * *

If walls have ears, what startling tales,

Those old rooms must have heard:

What sermons they might preach, the stones

That paved that old court-yard!

* * *

By those oak-pales the first Oaks' stakes

Were put down long ago:

Germ of that Epsom growth that now

All ring-fence doth outgrow.

There the first Derby favourite

Was measured by the yard:

And there a century's Sellengers[12]

Fortunes have made or marred.

Till the world grew so fond of "books,"

So giv'n to make the same,

That the old ground too small was found,

For the Turf's "little game";

As from his Grosvenor Place old Tatt

Started to win life's race,

Young Tatt, on fortune bent, again

Takes flight from Grosvenor Place.

At Knightsbridge, lo, a fair glass roof

Stands for the dark old sheds:

We've tiles as shiny 'neath our feet,

As those upon our heads:

But still we love the haunts where first

The Turf's keen breath we drew:

And what recalls those ancient halls

We best love in the new-

The old brown fox, that from his box

Still peers with artful face,

A hint that to the sharp as well

As swift, is given the race.

We miss the verdant lawn, where paced

Crowds of green men and still:

The gravelled walk, which losers oft

More gravelled, used to fill:

And sadder loss than all-no more

The old cow crops the lawn:

Meek monitor of draughts to come

From milch-cows yet undrawn!

Good bye, old yard, and may the new

As long its honours wear;

And though they leave the Corner still,

May Tatts be on the Square!

Even so small an event as the giving up in 1865 of his business by Farrance, the confectioner's at Charing Cross, was not allowed to pass without due homage:-

Other Farrances may rise,

Quite as bilious as before,

But the old familiar pies

(Veal and Ham) will glad our eyes

Nevermore, O nevermore!

Towards new or projected buildings Punch was seldom benevolent. When it was announced that a new National Gallery was to be erected on the site spoiled by the old, he was sceptical of the result, but he greeted the tardy appearance of the lions in Trafalgar Square in 1867, and welcomed the opening of the Albert Hall on March 28, 1871, as providing a building unrivalled for space, sound and light-a eulogy hardly fulfilled as far as acoustics are concerned. But it has a splendid echo, it can hold 10,000 people, and as a scene for the activities of massed brass bands there is nothing to touch it, in London at any rate. Over the Holborn Restaurant, which in 1874 replaced an institution contrived to pay a double debt to bathing and dancing, Punch waxed positively fulsome, but his praise was chiefly inspired by the cuisine; in those days good restaurants for the middle classes were few and far between.

The buildings for the International Exhibition of 1862, planned by Captain Francis Fowke, R.E., did not altogether commend themselves to Punch, who was inclined to cavil at the bad arrangements, and to compare the structure unfavourably with the Crystal Palace, but Fowke's plans had been scamped owing to lack of funds, and he was not responsible for the artistic shortcomings of the building. Punch's comments are chiefly remarkable for his prophetic observations on our choice of executive officials:-

We are certainly a wonderful people, and work, as perhaps our foreign friends will think, in a paradoxical sort of way. It was a gardener who planned our Crystal Palace for '51, and eleven years later we are indebted for the design of another Exhibition to a soldier. A barrister superintends the casting of our great bells, and we have an architect who is an authority on fortification. Well, perhaps when our coasts are invaded a bishop may be a Secretary at War, and a physician presiding at the Admiralty.

THE LIONS AT LAST

"Thank you, Sir Edwin. England at last has 'done her duty.'"

The somewhat chequered career of "Big Ben" is followed with sympathy and interest throughout this period by Punch, who claimed to have given him his name. Those who lived in London during the years when his voice was hushed, and welcomed the breaking of his war silence on Armistice Day, will read, not without emotion, the lines which appeared on November 29, 1873:-

BIG BEN

"The great clock of the Houses of Parliament is stopped for a day or two, in order that the 'going train' may be cleaned by Messrs. Dent. During the present month its accumulated error has on no occasion exceeded a second."--Pall Mall Gazette.

Big Ben, that beats from Barry's Tower

The march of time and tide,

To Britain's Commons, and the world

Of London far and wide,

Stops-and the town that marked the hush

Of his deep voice with pain,

Is glad to hear 'tis but a halt,

To clean his "going train."

* * *

O, brave Big Ben, that keep'st true step

Thus with the tide of time,

Long may'st thou to the Commons set

Example so sublime;

That England, both of House below

And Clock above, may say,

'Tis no vain boast that to the world

She shows the time of day!

May headlong Wits, that on the seats

Under the Clock may show,

Learn by its even beat above

To tune hot brains below.

And never hold up hands unless

The voice of truth to swell;

Nor strike, except at the right hour,

And then strike strokes that tell.

Cabs v. Omnibuses

Complaints against the public vehicles of London and their drivers continue, but are hardly pitched in so strident a tone as in earlier years. Still the brigandage of competitive 'buses is severely denounced in 1858; the extent of the evil may be gauged from the drastic regulations issued in the autumn of 1860, so drastic as to excite compassion for the conductor who faithfully carried them out.

Punch's hostility to the "growler" and its bibulous and rapacious driver as the first of all London nuisances remained implacable. A report was circulated at the close of 1869 that their final disappearance was imminent; it was nearly fifty years too "previous," but the wish being father to the thought, Punch indulged in a premature farewell to this "unseemly vehicle". With the advent of "clean cabs and civil drivers" he anticipated that no one would ever think of entering an omnibus, little thinking that a time would come when, with clean and swift 'buses, only the affluent would think of entering a taxi-cab.

Swell (to corpulent cabman): "Haw, here's sixpence-get yourself-glass-beer."

Cabby: "Thank you, sir, all the same; but I never take it. I'm a follerin' Mr. Bantin's adwice for corpulence, sir. He says, I may take two or three glasses o' good claret, or a glass or two of sherry wine, or red port, or medeiry, any sort o' sperits-"

(Swell, deeply touched, makes the sixpence half-a-crown.)

The placidity which one associates with mid-Victorian life was rudely disturbed in London by the garrotting scare in the 'sixties. Complaints of the inefficiency of the police and attacks on the Commissioner are frequent in those years. Yet street accidents were far fewer, and, on the whole, it cannot be maintained that London has become safer to live in. The mention of the police reminds one that the tall hat was discarded in 1865 for the helmet, a sensible change which was at first met with undeserved ridicule. The possibility of a strike of policemen at the end of 1872 seemed to Punch so incredible that he declined to treat it seriously.

TO GARROTTERS-"CAVE TOMKINS"

Tomkins (loq.): "Let 'em try it on again, that's all."

* * *

[12] St. Legers.

* * *

PART II

[Pg 168]

[Pg 169]

THE SOCIAL FABRIC

THE COURT

If the word "amazing" had not lost most of its significance through overwork since August, 1914, we should be inclined to apply it to the frankness with which Royalty and the Court were criticized and discussed by the Press in the 'forties and 'fifties. Punch, as we have seen, took a leading hand in the game, though he contrived to combine loyalty to the person of the Queen with the most outspoken attacks on the exercise of Court patronage and the extravagance of courtiers. But he did not stop here. The Prince Consort was mercilessly ridiculed for his Germanism, his notions of sport, his passion for tailoring, and, most serious offence of all, his alleged intervention in high politics. After ten years of anti-Albertianism, Punch dropped, to a considerable extent at any rate, the game of baiting the Prince, cordially admitted his services in connexion with the Exhibition of 1851, and for the rest of the period surveyed in our first volume granted him a comparative immunity from hostile criticism.

The change, or conversion, was not due to expediency or to a change of editorship or of the staff. It had already begun several years before the death, in 1857, of Punch's most democratic contributor, Douglas Jerrold. It was typical of a change in the enlightened middle-class opinion of which Punch was the mirror. The Monarchy had gained in popularity, and though there was no great revulsion of feeling about the Prince until after his death, he had earned respect by his active interest in education and philanthropy and the sagacity in counsel which was most freely acknowledged by those who came in closest contact with him. The charges of undue intervention and interference were effectually dealt with by Ministers at the time, though Punch failed to acknowledge his vindication, and the Life of Lord Beaconsfield shows that a much stronger case can be made out against the Queen on this count when she was no longer able to rely on the advice of the Prince.

The change in Punch's conception of his r?le as regards the Court did not come in the twinkling of an eye. But from 1858 onwards he is less of the licensed Court Jester, more of the unofficial Laureate. The old Punch, who had his eye on Tsars and Kaisers (like the Skibbereen Eagle) and autocrats is not dead yet. He has a tremendous fling in the "Essence of Parliament" in July, 1858, à propos of a contemplated revision of the Prayer-book:-

Lord Stanhope, a Peer exceedingly well entitled to be heard upon any such subject, then obtained an Address for cutting out of our Prayer Books the savage and abject forms of worship which our forefathers, at certain moments of excitement, thought it well to prescribe on certain anniversaries, as Guy Fawkes Day, the Martyrdom Day, and Oak Apple Day. When one reflects that the people who composed such things adulated the dirty old coward and fool, James the First; looked on while the body of the greatest of our English kings (except Alfred)-we mean, of course, King Oliver the First, and unfortunately the Only-was dragged from its grave to the gallows; and ecstatically murmured the Nunc dimittis when the friend of Nelly Gwynn, by no means his worst friend, returned to betray the public honour of England, and debauch that of her private life; one only wonders that such ecclesiastical profanities have been tolerated so long. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishops of London, Oxford, and Cashel, expressed the sentiments that might be expected from enlightened gentlemen; but the offensive services found defenders in the poor old Bishop of Bangor, in the Bishop of St. Asaph, who has Mr. Punch's royal licence henceforth to sign himself A Sap, and in a brace of foolish Peers, called Marlborough and Duncannon: opposition which was the only thing wanting to show that every man of decent intellect feels alike on the subject.

Marriage of the Princess Royal

The disparaging allusion earlier in the same year to Prince Albert's Prize Pig and the attack on the bestowal of a K.C.B. on Colonel Charles Beaumont Phipps, the Prince Consort's Treasurer and Equerry to the Queen, are quite eclipsed by this explosion. But Punch was always ready to speak disrespectfully of a dictator. Constitutional monarchy he could respect and even admire, as Herbert Spencer said of the moderate proficiency of an amateur billiard-player. The new voice, the voice of the unofficial Laureate, had already been heard in his "Epithalamium" on the Princess Royal in 1858, over whose engagement, when it was first announced, he had been far from enthusiastic:-

Farewell, young Royal Lady,

Ne'er may your life wax shady,

Still may your path be shiny,

All rosy-nothing spiny.

Macbeth, when sitting stately,

You were beholding lately,

A point, which I may mention,

Perhaps won your attention:

The line of Kings, descending

From Banquo, never ending;

I hail you the Queen Mother,

Young Bride, of such another.

May the first line long sit in

The royal seat of Britain,

On Prussia's throne the second,

From you to doomsday reckoned.

United in alliance,

May those two lines defiance

Bid evermore to treason,

By governing with reason.

The prophecy in the third and fourth stanzas gives one a shiver: but the word doomsday may pass in the sense of the day of doom. Simultaneously the critic appears in "A Few Queries touching a late wedding":-

Can't our penny-a-liners be loyal,

Without writing themselves down flunkeys?

Can't our crowd gape at ciphers royal,

Without such percentage of "drunkies"?

When we want a wedding cantata

For our Princess Royal's espousal,

Why for Tennyson Catnach barter,

An owl for a singing ouzel?

When English Fiddlers find fingers,

And an English composer chords,

Can't we find six English singers,

Who at least could pronounce the words?

* * *

Must we still in ruts of old stick,

All alike, both high and humble,

Our nobs the slaves of Goldstick,

Our snobs the slaves of Bumble?

THE DRAWING ROOM

(A stoppage of a few minutes is supposed to take place.)

Dreadful Boy (on lamp post): "Oh! My eye, Bill! 'Ere's a rose bud."

THE ACCESSION OF THE QUEEN OF INDIA

In the same vein is the protest in the spring of the same year, against the journalistic flunkeyism of the report of the opening concert in St. James's Hall (described as "vast in dimensions, elegant in proportion and splendid in decoration") which was "honoured by the presence of H.R.H. the Prince Consort, a large number of our aristocracy, and a very numerous company belonging for the most part to the better classes of society"-an English revival of the term optimates which Punch very properly disliked and deprecated.

The reorganization of the Government in India brought the Queen a new title, and in his congratulations we see Punch at his best:-

To thee is given another land,

Another title of renown,

Another sceptre in thy hand,

And on thy head another crown.

To India now at last appears

Hope that before she ne'er had seen.

She smiles upon thee through her tears,

And looks for aid to England's Queen.

To thee, her last of Monarchs, first

She looks for justice, and the reign

Of mercy, nor will she have nursed

A fond belief, and hoped in vain.

No more a victim and a prey,

She trusts, with reason why she should,

Like all that live beneath thy sway,

She will be governed for her good.

This unofficial competition with the Laureate, however, did not prevent Punch from applauding Tennyson's additional stanzas to the National Anthem, which some critics had impugned for their metrical laxity. A little later on, à propos of the Queen's alleged refusal to wear a crinoline in 1859, Punch in a mood of mixed loyalty and levity contributed a new version of his own:-

Long live our gracious Queen,

Who won't wear Crinoline,

Long live the Queen!

May her example spread,

Broad skirts be narrowèd,

Long trains be shortenèd,

Long live the Queen!

O storm of scorn arise,

Scatter French fooleries,

And make them pall.

Confound those hoops and things,

Frustrate those horrid springs,

And indiarubber rings,

Deuce take them all!

May dresses flaunting wide,

Fine figures cease to hide;

Let feet be seen.

Girls to good taste return,

Paris flash modes unlearn,

No more catch fire and burn,

Thanks to the Queen!

The Empress Eugénie, it should be added by way of explanation, had already fallen under the lash of Punch's satire for supporting the crinoline, and starting absurd fashions, amongst which he specially notes the "occipital bonnet"-worn at the back of the head.

Punch and the Royal Princes

The Princess Royal was already off the Queen's and Mr. Punch's hands. The birth of her son in 1859-grande et conspicuum nostro quoque tempore monstrum-is duly celebrated in some lines "On an auspicious event" in which the Duchess of Kent is saluted as a great-grandmother. But in 1859 and 1860 Punch, who liked to take himself very seriously as an instructor of youth, is mainly concerned with the education of the Royal Princes. Prince Alfred (the Duke of Edinburgh) was already a middy, and his tour in Egypt and Palestine prompted severe comments on the obsequiousness with which he was fêted in the near East. As for the Prince of Wales, the dangers of sycophancy were (according to Punch) much less than those of over-pressure. In the cartoon entitled "The Royal Road to Learning," the Prince in cap and gown is shown surrounded by a group of stout, spectacled, bald and bottle-nosed professors and dons bowing and scraping before the Royal youth. Punch protests, too, in spirited doggerel against the process which threatened to make the Prince Jack-of-all-trades and lord of none. It is at any rate a consolation to think that the Prince of Wales evaded and survived the alleged attempt to convert him into a walking encyclop?dia. The Prince's visit to Canada and the United States as "Baron Renfrew" in 1860 is followed with close interest and sympathy, and the frequent references in text and illustrations suggest many curious parallels with the experiences of his grandson in 1920. Punch welcomed the Prince's release from his arduous studies and was gratified with his reception; he did not acquit the American Press of sycophancy, but was obviously pleased when the New York Herald said that his "genial and unpretending" disposition had "gained him the affection of many true and worthy hearts." Perhaps the greatest compliment was paid him by an Irishman who accosted him in his railway car and said: "Come back four years from now and we'll run you for President."

THE ROYAL ROAD TO LEARNING

But to us the most interesting comment on the visit is Punch's twice-repeated suggestion that the Prince might do a great deal worse than bring back an American bride. He made it on the Prince's departure in July in an Ode, with the apology, "If the Laureate won't do his work, Punch must," in which he says:

Transcendent charms drive even monarchs frantic,

A German Princess must he marry?

And who can say he may not carry

One of Columbia's fascinating daughters

O'er the Atlantic?

And he returns more seriously to the charge three months later:-

COUSINS FOR KINGS AND QUEENS

A Law which Nature contravenes,

A rule of Rank and State,

Forbids our Princes, Kings and Queens,

With British spouse to mate.

The safety of the Realm commands

Them Protestants to wed;

And therefore is their choice of hands

Extremely limited.

Their Cousins are our Royal race

Confined, almost, to woo,

Who, by the nature of the case

Are German Cousins too.

Now German Cousins far removed

All very well may be,

But Cousins German oft have proved

Too near the parent tree.

Near cousins o'er the German tide,

What need remains to seek,

Now steamers cross the Atlantic wide,

Almost within a week?

Of Yankee Land the Beauty pales

All Continental Fair;

Might not a bride be found for Wales,

A distant Cousin, there?

Royal Speeches Criticized

From this onward for a great many years Punch was not content with supplementing the inactivities of the Laureate, but seldom allowed any event in the Royal annals-births, deaths, engagements or weddings-to pass unchronicled in serious rhyme. The art of eulogy is difficult, and the most that can be said of these efforts is that they were generally graceful and appropriate, and that their loyalty seldom degenerated into fulsomeness. On the subject of royal speeches Punch showed good sense as well as great frankness, in connexion with the public utterances of the Prince of Wales on the occasion of his visit to Ireland in 1861:-

WANTED, A COURT PENMAN

Royal personages, in answering loyal addresses, of course speak only that which is set down for them. If they made speeches of their own they would be continually committing themselves, unawares, to this statement and that, and unwittingly treading upon the corns of various people right and left. At least, to avoid making mistakes of this sort, they would have to take an amount of trouble in composing their replies so great that it would very much interfere with their ordinary business, and entirely spoil their pleasure. It is therefore necessary that Princes should be provided with attendants having the office to compose, and put into form, the platitudes in which they are called upon, from time to time, to acknowledge the compliments which are paid to them. But then the platitudes ought to be expressed in proper terms, such as it may become a Prince to utter; that is, in language which a decently educated person would naturally use. Now, is anybody who has been brought up in any school better than a Commercial Academy capable of delivering himself in such a style as that of the subjoined slip-slop which the Prince of Wales had to read in answer to an address presented to him by the Kingstown Commissioners?-

"Gentlemen,-I most heartily thank you for the gratifying terms in which, on your own behalf and that of the inhabitants of Kingstown, you greet me on my arrival at your port, after a voyage performed with such ease and expedition in the admirable vessel considerately placed at my disposal by its enterprising proprietors."

His Royal Highness is also actually made to say:-

"During former visits to Ireland, and particularly in the course of a tour made some years ago through the country, I had considerable opportunities of witnessing the beauty of her scenery."

Some clue to the authorship of the preceding instances of haberdashers' eloquence may perhaps be found in those characteristic forms of speech, "considerable" opportunities, and "witnessing" the beauty of her scenery. These are the notorious idioms of that sort of penny-a-lining which is the least worth a penny. The advisers of the Prince of Wales should cause their own private secretaries to write the speeches which they give the Prince to make, and not employ for that purpose the undermost reporter engaged on the Court Circular. At least let the Queen's son be allowed to speak his Mother's English.

As there is a Poet Laureate, so likewise ought there to be a Royal Professor of Prose, whose office, however, shall not be merely honorary, but shall consist in plainly wording the simple ideas which Royalty is occasionally called upon to express. Mr. Punch could mention some young men who, at a sufficiently high wage, would accept the work.

Whether the hint was taken or not, the fact remains that for a good many years Royal oratory has ceased to deserve such criticism. It may not be Ciceronian; it does not inflame or transport the hearer, but at least it is free from the cheap haberdashers' eloquence which aroused Punch's wrath sixty years ago.

The visit of the Queen and Prince Consort to Ireland in August, 1861, passed off without any untoward incident, but the comments in Punch were mainly ironical, as in the cartoon, "Doth not a meeting like this make amends," in which the Queen observes, "My dear Ireland, how much better you look since my last visit. I am so glad." For the rest there is much pungent criticism directed against the assiduity of the newspaper correspondents in chronicling small beer. The demonstrations were too carefully stage-managed in the operatic style: the odour of the footlights invaded Killarney; and Punch is quite furious with the snobbery of the unfortunate special correspondent who declared that "the Queen and Prince Albert repeatedly expressed their unqualified admiration of the scenery. His Royal Highness said many portions were sublime." It is by such practices, Punch truly remarks, that "the Press is lowered in repute and people think it is the work of a vulgarian to write for it."

In the year 1861 the Queen lost both her mother and her husband. The Prince Consort had outlived a great deal of his unpopularity-faithfully reflected in the pages of Punch. Yet even so late as 1858 he met with scant sympathy in the malicious imaginary conversation between the Emperor of the French, the Queen and himself at Cherbourg. The Emperor figures as the miles gloriosus, boastful of his strength; the Queen is ironically polite: Prince Albert angular and tactless. The mere suddenness and unexpectedness of his death brought a great reaction; those who had depreciated and disparaged him when living were especially vocal in their praises of the dead; but the full extent and significance of his loss to the Queen was not understood till long afterwards. Those terrible cartoons of Leech will keep coming before our eyes as we read the bland elegiac stanzas in which Punch made amends for ten years of scarifying ridicule:-

It was too soon to die.

Yet, might we count his years by triumphs won,

By wise, and bold, and Christian duties done,

It were no brief eventless history.

This was his princely thought:

With all his varied wisdom to repay

Our trust and love, which on that Bridal Day

The Daughter of the Isles for dowry brought.

For that he loved our Queen,

And for her sake, the people of her love,

Few and far distant names shall rank above

His own, where England's cherished names are seen.

Punch and the Princess of Wales

The Queen never quite recovered from her bereavement. The next twenty years of her life were spent more or less in retirement; and Punch, in his pious and quite sincere request to be allowed to "share her grief," could not be expected to foresee that in less than two years the nation would have grown restive at the Queen's continued seclusion and that he himself would have become active in expressing its discontent. In 1862 the wedding of Princess Alice received the usual meed of ceremonial verse, Punch being happily spared a glimpse into the future in store for her and her daughters; and the refusal of the Greek Crown by Prince Alfred is recognized to be judicious. Punch bore the Prince of Wales no malice for not acting on his suggestion about an American bride; and greeted Princess Alexandra of Denmark as enthusiastically if not as poetically as the Laureate himself. When the wedding procession passed down Fleet Street (the offices of the paper were then at No. 85), the Princess was greeted with an effusion of loyal sentiment and champagne. But in her beauty, grace, and popularity Punch saw a means of rescuing women of fashion from their expensive servility to French milliners, and within a fortnight of his chronicling the marriage festivities he appeals to her to set the fashions for British ladies, hitherto copied from the French, and thus "turn the tide of absurdity in costume from the abyss into which, before her seasonable arrival, it was tending to plunge them." Long dresses, "sweeping and brushing the earth," heraldic gold-dust, powder and hair dyes are especially singled out for condemnation.

The birth of the Duke of Clarence is loyally chronicled in January, 1864, though in the following number Punch could not resist the temptation of printing some verses in parody of Tupper, then at the zenith of his popularity. The birth of the present King in the summer of the following year prompted some frank but friendly comments in Punch's "Essence of Parliament." Sir George Grey moved the address of congratulation to the Queen. Then follows this characteristic passage:-

Mr. Disraeli, who we are glad to perceive had so completely recovered from his gout as to be able to attend at the splendid marriage of Miss Evelina de Rothschild, and make the most tender and graceful of speeches in honour of the occasion, seconded the motion, which Mr. Punch, rousing himself for a moment into loyal enthusiasm, has the distinguished pleasure of thirding-and relapses.

The plain fact was that Punch was growing increasingly dissatisfied with the continued retirement of the "Royal Recluse." This dissatisfaction began with a "Loyal Whisper" at the time of the Prince's wedding:-

"Nay, let my people see me." Kind

Was She whom then our cheers were greeting:

Now, would that Lady bear in mind

That words like those will bear repeating.

But it soon swelled to more vocal dimensions. It was one thing to check the extravagances of "indelicate and obtrusive loyalty"; it was another to maintain an almost Oriental aloofness. The subject is returned to again and again, in prose and verse, and in two cartoons by Tenniel: notably that of "Queen Hermione" in 1865. But the candour of Punch reaches its highest level in his comments on the announcement early in 1866 of the institution of a new decoration-the Albert Medal.

The "Effete Monarchy"

Mr. Punch's loyalty has been proved too often for question. Without the slightest apology, therefore, he proceeds to say what he would have preferred to leave unsaid, for it is not the part of a true friend to be silent when he should speak. Mr. Punch has cordially approved every reasonable effort to preserve the memory of the good Prince whose loss we all deplore. Statues, in far greater number than ever was accorded to an English Worthy, have been reared in honour of the lamented Consort. Though it is now just sixty years since Nelson was laid in St. Paul's, our great sea-captain's monument is unfinished-we hear nothing at all of the national monument to our great land-captain, though it is more than thirteen years since Wellington was laid by the side of Nelson-but the most splendid and costly of memorials is rapidly rising, in the Park, in testimony of our veneration for Prince Albert. When this shall have been completed, will it not be almost time to leave that good man's fame to take care of itself? Society is at least half inclined to believe that enough has been done in this way, and it will not be well that society should begin to smile at persistent efforts to add tribute to tribute. There is really no fitness in giving the Prince's name to the medal that is to reward the noblest of sea-service.

The Prince had no kind of connexion with or special regard for sea-achievements, though the irreverent may remark that his own courage was shown when he voyaged, inasmuch as he notoriously suffered on such occasions more than anyone else on board. Anything like ridicule should not be permitted to connect itself with an honoured memory.

The Albert Medal, as we know, was not restricted to those who exhibited conspicuous gallantry in the rescue of life from shipwreck, and the remarks we have quoted may very well have contributed to its being awarded in recognition of heroic deeds on land as well. A fortnight later a passage quoted from the New York Herald impelled Punch to reaffirm his loyalty to the Monarchy:-

England is completely prepared to become Republican, but the undoubted personal popularity of the Queen will probably sustain the effete monarchy until the time arrives for transmission of the Crown. But as for an Edward the Seventh, that is out of the question.

Whereon Punch observes "are there twenty republicans in England, deducting Bedlam?" On February 6 the Queen opened Parliament in person:-

The Queen has not performed this ceremony during the last five years, and the reason for the Sovereign's seclusion would render it unbecoming for Mr. Punch to say any word upon the subject of Her reappearance, except that it greatly rejoiced the nation and himself.

This emergence was welcome, but it was not followed up and did not satisfy public opinion, as we gather from an appeal made in the following year:-

The Pall Mall Gazette, inviting Her Majesty to resume her personal sway over society, says:-

"During the first twenty years of Queen Victoria's reign the salons of London did not reek with tobacco smoke, neither did the noble, the pure, and the young stagger under red wigs, glare with rouge and pearl-powder, or leer with painted eyes."

No. Neither do the noble and the pure stagger, glare or leer now. But if the ignoble, the impure, and some of the young do these things, and can be deterred from them by royal displeasure, manifested in the dignified way in which the First Lady would mark it, we should rejoice to know that the Queen intended to come forward and do an unwelcome duty. No worthier homage can be offered to the dead than a painful sacrifice for the sake of the living. The Crown has direct power over the court-class, and as for the idiots who parody their patrons, the parody, as we firmly believe, would be pursued even if great folks took to virtue and going to church. Which considerations, with the deepest respect, Mr. Punch submits to the notice of his Royal Mistress.

Many of us thought that the lavish use of paint and dye by the young was a portent of Georgian post-war days: it is something of a surprise, possibly a relief, to find it was prevalent more than fifty years ago.

From this point onwards one may notice a disposition to acquiesce in the self-imposed seclusion of the Queen, though any movement towards breaking it down is at once recognized and welcomed-even such a small thing as the publication of her Journal of our Life in the Highlands. Thus we read that its issue "on the advice of Mr. Arthur Helps is likely, if such a thing were possible, to endear her still more to the loving hearts of her people," and in a set of verses on "The Queen's Book" the Queen is applauded for her wise and womanly thought:-

What Queen like this was ever known

To take her people to her heart?

When was Queen's household-life so shown

With modest truth and artless art?

The Royal Widow has done well

Thus on her people's love to call,

Her simple wifely tale to tell

And trust her joys and griefs to all.

The writer was evidently well aware that cynics and literary critics would make fun of the book, but the defence of sincerity comes with added weight from one who was always on the look out for ineptitudes in high places.

The announcement of the betrothal of the Princess Louise to the Marquis of Lorne gave Punch a fine opportunity in the autumn of 1870 of vindicating his prescience, and simultaneously revealing Thackeray in the light of a political prophet:-

A (REAL) GERMAN DEFEAT

THE ROYAL MARRIAGE

Thackeray among the Prophets

Mr. Punch begs leave to make a distinguished bow to his excellent (if Conservative) contemporary, the Bath Chronicle. That admirable journal, the studies of whose Conductor are so evidently in a right direction that the success of the paper is a matter of course, has turned back to a somewhat remote Number of Punch, and has been amply rewarded by lighting upon an article, which has been transferred to the columns of the Bath Chronicle, with appropriate remarks, a portion of which Mr. Punch has the utmost pleasure in reproducing:-

"Twenty-one years ago, in the Number of Punch for February 3, 1849, the late Mr. Thackeray drew an imaginary picture of 'England in 1869,' in supposed extracts from the newspapers of the period. One of these, under the heading of 'Marriages of the Royal Family,' is so applicable to the circumstances of 'England in 1870' that it is worth reproducing. The humourist would have been amused himself had he lived to see how nearly he hit the mark. The following is the paragraph we refer to:-

"'Marriages of the Royal Family.-Why should our Princes and Princesses be compelled always to seek in Germany for matrimonial alliances? Are the youths and maidens of England less beautiful than those of Saxe and Prussia? Are the nobles of our own country, who have been free for hundreds of years, who have shown in every clime the genius, the honour, the splendour of Britain-are these, we ask, in any way inferior to a Prince (however venerable) of Sachs-Schlippenschloppen, or a Grand Duke of Pigwitz-Gruntenstein? We would breathe no syllable of disrespect against these potentates-we recognize in them as in ourselves the same Saxon blood-but why, we ask, shall not Anglo-Saxon Princes or Princesses wed with free Anglo-Saxon nobles, themselves the descendants, if not the inheritors of kings? We have heard in the very highest quarters rumours which under these impressions give us the very sincerest delight. We have heard it stated that the august mother and father of a numerous and illustrious race, whose increase is dear to the heart of every Briton, have determined no longer to seek for German alliances for their exalted children, but to look at home for establishments for those so dear to them. More would be at present premature. We are not at liberty to mention particulars, but it is whispered that Her Royal Highness The Princess Boadicea is about to confer her royal hand upon a young nobleman who is eldest son of a noble peer who is connected by marriage with our noble and venerable Premier, with the Foreign and Colonial Secretaries, and with H.G. the Archbishop of Canterbury. The same "little bird" also whispers that His Royal Highness, Prince Hengist, has cast an eye of princely approbation upon a lovely and accomplished young lady of the highest classes, whose distinguished parents are "frae the North," whose name is known and beloved throughout the wide dominions of Britain's sway-in India, at the Admiralty, at the Home and Colonial Offices and in both Houses of Parliament.'

"The first part of the prediction is being accomplished with a literalness that should drive Zadkiel to despair. The Princess Louise, then a baby not quite a year old, is betrothed to the eldest son of a nobleman actually in office, who comes 'frae the North,' and whose name is certainly known in India, seeing that he is and has for some time been the Secretary of State for India. Moreover he is connected by marriage with the Foreign Secretary, Earl Granville, for he married a Gower, the Earl's first cousin, while as the head of the Campbells he may claim cousinship with the Earl's second wife, Miss Campbell, of Islay, as well as with the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose mother was a Campbell."

Opposition to Royal Grants

When the question of the Princess's dowry and annuity came up in the House of Commons early in 1871, Parliamentary opposition to Royal grants reared its head, and Punch's summary of the debate is worth quoting:-

Mr. Gladstone, in a long speech, proposed, and Mr. Disraeli, with a gesture, seconded the proposal for granting ￡30,000 as dowry to Princess Louise, and ￡6,000 as H.R.H.'s annuity. There was loud acclamation from all parts of the House, and when Mr. Peter Taylor rose, hat in hand, to oppose the grant, the resolution had been carried. Here it may be convenient to add that, at a later stage, Mr. Taylor, rising amid groans from all sides, opposed the grant, and Sir Robert Peel expressed regret that a Princess had, by the advice of Ministers, been allowed to contract herself to the son of a Minister. Mr. Disraeli, as might be expected, treated the matter in a much more graceful way, paid a pleasant compliment to the Marquis of Lorne, and was glad that a Princess had accepted a Member of the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone corrected Sir Robert, saying that deviation from the established rule of Royal marriage had been advised upon about eighteen months ago, and long before the engagement to the Marquis. The division was the most amusing which Mr. Punch has ever chronicled. There were, for the grant, 350; against it, 1. This unit was Mr. Fawcett, but there were really Three against the grant, namely, himself and two Tellers, Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Peter Taylor. The Commons roared lustily, and the nation echoed the roar.

With a backing which though minute in numbers was strong in intellect, it was not to be expected that this opposition would disappear. It was again manifested over the grant to Prince Arthur in the same year, when Punch advised Sir Charles Dilke to renounce his title if he persisted in his opposition to royalties, and in 1872 Shirley Brooks gives a lively account of the debate on the proposed inquiry into the Civil List on the night of March 19, when Mr. Gladstone treated Sir Charles Dilke as Ulysses did Thersites:-

Having demolished his man, our Ulysses sat down amid astounding cheers from the Opposition as well as from his own party. Then another Aristocrat followed in the wake of the Baronet. The Honourable Auberon Herbert announced his preference for a Republic. The row then set in fiercely, and Mr. Punch inclines to draw a veil over proceedings that did not greatly redound to the credit of the House of Commons. It is true that they were an index of public opinion in the matter, but Parliament is expected to be decorous, and not to allow cock-crowing as an argument. Even the Gallic Cock could not have behaved worse. The Speaker said that the scene gave him great pain. Counts were attempted, and then strangers and reporters were excluded for an hour, and then there was a division on an attempt at adjournment-negatived by 261 to 23. Mr. Fawcett opposed the motion in a spirited and sensible speech, and denounced the mixing up the question of Republicanism with "huckstering and haggling over the cost of the Queen's household." Finally, there was division on the motion itself, and the voters for it, including Tellers, were three Aristocrats, namely, Baronets Dilke and Lawson, and Mr. Herbert, son of an Earl, and they had one friend, Mr. Anderson, of Glasgow. Against these Four were, without Tellers, Two Hundred and Seventy-Six. The House roared with laughter, and soon went away. The Republican attack on the Queen was about as contemptible as that by the lad who presented the flintless and empty pistol the other day; but in the latter case as in the former, the affair was one for the police, and Constable Gladstone A1, was quite equal to the occasion.

In the same number appears the cartoon, "Another Empty Weapon," in which "Little Charley Dilke," with a large horse-pistol labelled "Motion," is seized by the scruff of the neck by Constable Gladstone A1 as a Royal State coach is passing by.

A FRENCH LESSON

Britannia: "Is that the sort of thing you want, you little idiot?"

Dilke returned to the charge again on the marriage of Prince Alfred (the Duke of Edinburgh) in 1874. How strongly Punch felt on this point may be gathered from the statement in the Life of Sir Charles Dilke that Shirley Brooks refused to meet him on account of his Republican speeches. The subject may be dismissed for the present with the excellent, if apocryphal, anecdote in rhyme which appeared in Punch under the heading, "A Problem Solved":-

About the Queen the Bart. C. Dilke

Vents talk as acid as sour milk.

Punch wants to know if this be true

Which, told to him, he tells to you-

How a great Lady deigned to wonder

At Charley's anti-Windsor thunder

"His father was so kind and mild-

I knew this gentleman a child:

I've stroked his hair. I sometimes say

I must have stroked it the wrong way."

The Albert Hall was opened on March 28, 1871, and the occasion is seized to administer a comprehensive rebuke to those who found it easy to laugh at the Queen, the Prince Consort, King Cole (Sir Henry Cole) and the Kensington "Boilers." That there were grounds for discontent, and that it was unwise to overlook the existence of industrial unrest, militant Radicalism and Republicanism Punch freely admits in the vigorous doggerel entitled, "Looking Facts in the Face," in which he plays the part of candid friend to Queen, Lords and Commons alike. After examining the just causes for discontent at home, the activities of Bradlaugh and Odger, and the ominous warnings furnished by the Commune and the spread of the new doctrines of Karl Marx and the Internationalists, Punch continues:-

So we, who don't hold that the world

To come right must be set topsy-turvy,

Those now at the helm from it hurled,

And their place taken crassa Minerva,

Had better look squalls in the face,

Make snug for a douche and a drenching,

And-Queen, Lords, and Commons-embrace

The supports that will stand the most wrenching.

Were I Queen, I'd not so play my r?le,

As if bent to prove those right who flout me,

And show, while folks pay the Crown toll,

How well things can go on without me.

Were I Lord, Folly's gales I would thwart,

Not by spreading my sails, but by furling 'em:

Nor expose my prestige to be caught

In the traps of the Gun Club and Hurlingham.

Were I in the Commons, I'd strive

More than one Bill a Session to carry;

Nor abreast all my 'buses to drive,

Till all in a block have to tarry.

As Queen, Lords, or Commons, in fine,

My course by the chart were I making,

I should take just the opposite line

To that Queen, Lords, and Commons are taking.

This was the first time that Karl Marx was mentioned in Punch. As for Odger, who is alluded to in the same verses, it may be recalled that at a meeting at Leicester held in this autumn he was credited with the statement that "me and my colleagues have resolved that the Prince of Wales shall never ascend the throne."

Anti-Monarchical Sentiment

There was undoubtedly a strong wave of anti-monarchical sentiment in England in 1871. It was not confined to agitators or extremists, but found utterance in organs which represented moderate opinion. Lord Morley in his Life of Gladstone quotes from the Pall Mall Gazette of September 29, 1871, to illustrate the depth and wide range of this discontent. He might very well have quoted Punch also as documentary evidence. The Political History of England sums up the grounds of this resentment among friendly critics not unfairly: "Ten years' seclusion from social activity and public duty seemed an excessive indulgence in the luxury of sorrow." The sympathy stirred by the Queen's illness in September, 1871, marked the beginning of a reaction; the acute anxiety "aroused by the dangerous illness of the Prince of Wales in the following December, and the subsequent rejoicings on his recovery, did much to improve the relations between Crown and people"; and Punch quotes the Queen's message of thanks to the nation as the most "acceptable Christmas gift which could have been bestowed on a loyal and affectionate people." In the verses on the Thanksgiving Service in St. Paul's on February 27 he is at pains to meet the sneers of those who only saw:-

A Queen, and Prince and Princess, and their Court,

And coaches passing to St. Paul's to prayer;

To settle scores with Heaven in stately sort:-

A Show for once! and our shows are so rare.

But the defensive tone is soon dropped for one of congratulation:

Happy the Queen that can, love-guarded, go

Still, through a prayerful capital, to pray

Happy among these million hearts to know

Not one but beats in tune with hers to-day.

It was reserved, however, for later historians to detect in the renewed political activity of the Queen evidence of her distrust in the foreign policy of Gladstone. Among the signs of the times which mark the close of this period and the great Conservative revival which followed, few are more curious than the cartoon headed, "A Brummagem Lion," inspired by the visit to Birmingham of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the courtesy displayed by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain as mayor, in spite of his Radical proclivities.

A BRUMMAGEM LION

The references to foreign potentates and their relations with the British Court show little abatement of Punch's old distrust and hostility. Of the French Emperor's flying visit to Osborne in 1857 we read that it was "strictly private-none but policemen were admitted." The most friendly allusion to the Empress Eugénie refers to her having ridden in an ordinary hansom cab during a visit to England incog. in 1860. For the rest she is repeatedly attacked for her extravagance in dress, for dabbling in spiritualism, and for her interference in politics and support of the Papal pretensions. "Everyone has his oracle," says Punch late in 1862.... "Didn't Numa Pompilius have his Egeria? Why, then, shouldn't Pius have his Eugenia?" In the same year she is abused for attending a bull-fight, and satirized in a cartoon representing the Emperor as Hercules and the Empress as Omphale. Punch waxes indignant at the patronage extended by the Emperor to the variety stage in 1866, and wonders whether the infection will reach our Court. But his imagination entirely failed to forecast the bestowal of decorations on the heroes of the music-hall. We have moved since then. A famous story is told of Queen Victoria in her later years sending an Equerry to inquire the name of a lively air which had been played by her Court band. The Equerry returned to say that it was a popular song of the day. The Queen was dissatisfied and instructed him to find out and let her know the words. The Equerry went back, returned and proceeded to recite the classic stanza:-

Come where the booze is cheaper;

Come where the pots hold more;

Come where the boss is a bit of a Joss,

Come to the pub. next door.

There the story unfortunately ends, without the Queen's comment. But in the pages of Punch we read how in 1869, when the Constitutional régime had just been inaugurated in France under Emile Ollivier, the programme of one of the Queen's State concerts included "Heaven Preserve the Emperor, with variations," which prompts Punch to ask, "Would not this do for the French National Anthem?" In 1865 Punch devoted a cartoon to commemorate the completion of fifty years of peace between England and France, and in 1869 another on the centenary of the first Napoleon. With the catastrophe of 1870, Sedan and its sequel of exile and suffering, Punch's hostility changed to compassion, and his In memoriam verses on the Emperor, though too laboured and too frequently disfigured by inversions to attain to the dignity of poetry, form one of the best of contemporary summaries and estimates of the career and character of the dead ruler:-

Already scores of ready penmen draft

Of his life's course to power their bird's-eye view,

Through poverty and perjury and craft,

And redder stains that the blurred track imbrue.

Let whoso will count of his faults the cost,

And point a moral in his saddened end;

This is the thought in England uppermost-

He who has died among us, lived our friend.

If sinners may by suffering, too, be shriven,

What penance those lost years had to sustain!

The sting of fall and failure deeper driven

By the dull stroke of slow and sleepless pain.

* * *

The time to weigh him fairly is not now;

Nor are the true weights any France can bring:

That sprang to fix the crown upon his brow,

And her own neck beneath his feet to fling.

Heavily both have answered for their sin:

Nor did the Emperor heavier fall undo,

Than France, that backed him still while he could win,

Nor turned against him till the luck turned too.[13]

But now 'tis England, and not France that stands

Silent beside an Exile's dying bed,

Mindful of kindness received by his hands,

Sorrowing with those that sorrow for their dead.

Punch, as was made clear in the previous volume, was no lover of Prussian rule. On the eve of the war on Denmark he published a truly ferocious attack on King Wilhelm:-

THE SONG OF HOHENZOLLERN

Air-"The Standard Bearer."

French Emperor and Prussian King

I am a King; I reign by Right Divine,

As did my sires some hundred years before me;

Howe'er their crown was got, I came to mine,

Obey me then, O people, and adore me.

My seat I plant upon mine ancient Throne,

And order back the waves of Revolution.

My will the law, I sit supreme, alone,

My footstool is the Prussian Constitution.

Tsar Alexander's cause mine own I've made,

Regardless of the blame of any journal.

To crush the Poles I render him my aid;

Help him enforce his discipline paternal.

I lend a hand to catch the runaway,

The fugitive hand over to the slaughter;

And, on my mind, whatever you may say

Makes no more mark than what blows leave in water.

I'm called the Hangman's Cad, and I don't care

For that dishonourable appellation.

I carry Poland's garbage to the Bear,

Serene amid the loudest execration.

My mind is bent on arbitrary rule;

In policy I copy my late Brother.

If you presume to say he was a fool,

You'll very likely dare call me another.

Hostility to Prussia did not abate in the succeeding years, and in 1866 indignation is expressed at a rumour that the Queen was about to visit Germany. A general friendliness towards King Victor Emmanuel did not prevent Punch from insinuating that he had sold his birthright to the French Emperor, and from expressing the fear that Sardinia as well as Savoy would be ceded to France. The most that can be said of his treatment of the Tsar Alexander II is that it was not quite so vehemently hostile as that meted out to his father. As early as January, 1862, we read that "the Russian Empire, with its body of brass and its feet of clay, will, if it does not take care, be requiring some support some day, to keep it up, on account of the extreme 'weakness of its legs.'"

The annals of Royalty, outside England, certainly afforded little scope for admiration. But the year 1865 was enlivened by a humorous instance of misplaced monarchical ambition. The King of Abyssinia, who had detained certain British subjects as prisoners, "was said to have favoured Queen Victoria with an offer of marriage, and to have imprisoned her lieges in revenge for her non-appreciation of his dusky love."

* * *

[13] Punch notes that not a single shop was closed in Paris on the day of the Emperor's funeral.

* * *

GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE

From a variety of causes, most of which have been already discussed, reformers, humanitarians and critics of the established order generally display less resentment and acrimony throughout the mid-Victorian period. We have already hinted that the mellowing of Punch's temper may have been due in part to the death of Douglas Jerrold. But the fact remains that Punch had already begun to find less incentive to and less excuse for the saeva indignatio which animated his earlier tirades against the aristocracy, and the selfish detachment of the titled classes. The spectacle of the Cream of Society disporting themselves at Cremorne to the exclusion of the general public is satirized in 1858, but the satire is tempered by the admission that this aristocratic "jamboree" was organized for a charitable purpose and brought in substantial proceeds. An analysis of the special butts of Punch's satire reveals the interesting fact that, while not enjoying a complete immunity from criticism, the dukes are not only displaced from their unenviable pre-eminence, they almost disappear as targets for invective. We find attacks on the promotion of "well-connected politicians" à propos of Lord Clanricarde's appointment as Privy Seal in 1858; and verses in the same year on the worship of the peerage, with "John Bull loves a lord" as text, but the flunkeydom of the Press is already a far less frequent theme of scarifying comment. Punch's favourite occupation as the reviler of "Jenkins" was gone by the 'sixties, but snobbery in high places was not dead. Sir Benjamin Brodie, Sergeant-Surgeon to William IV and Queen Victoria, had been made a baronet in 1834; in 1858, when he was President of the Royal Society, there was some talk of his being made a peer, and Punch in December of that year bitterly attacked the influences and prejudices which he believed were effectual in preventing the bestowal of the honour.

EXCLUSIVENESS

Host: "Nice party, ain't it, Major Le Spunger? 'Igh and low, rich and poor-most people are welcome to this 'ouse! This is 'Liberty 'All,' this is! No false pride or 'umbug about me! I'm a self-made man, I am!"

The Major: "Very nice party, indeed, Mr. Shoddy! How proud your father and mother must feel! Are they here?"

Host: "Well, no! 'Ang it all, you know, one must draw the line somewhere!"

Peers and Commerce

The reign of the old nobility, however, was not merely threatened by outspoken criticism. The situation crystallized in the title of the play, New Men and Old Acres, was already a real thing; prosperous cotton-spinners were beginning to buy estates; by 1865 Punch was contrasting the new representatives of the landed interest with their feudal predecessors-very much to the disadvantage of the former-and by the 'seventies the contrast was a favourite theme of Du Maurier. Simultaneously the converse tendency of the aristocracy to go into trade is noted, but with little sympathy. Thus we find in 1863 the prospectus of the Noble Hotel-keepers' Association (Limited) headed by a list of parasitic peers, including the Duke of Dangleton, the Duke of Dawdleton, the Duke of Diddleton, the Marquis of Hardupton, the Earl of Toadington, Viscount Ortolan, the Lord Verisopht, Sir Lionel Rattlecash, Bart., and so on; and a double-page cartoon shows the scene in the coffee-room of one of the Hotels in which "gents" of different types are being waited on by coronetted and bewhiskered peers. Greed rather than business capacity is indicated as the characteristic of the new recruits of commerce, and the annals of the last fifty years have furnished disastrous and even tragic examples of the results of this titled invasion of the City. Experience has shown that on the whole it is safer to gain a peerage by success in commerce than to exploit a peerage as a short cut to making money.

AN INVESTMENT

"Tell me, my dear, who's that little man they all seem so dotingly fond of?"

"That, Uncle? Oh, that's Lord Alberic Lackland!"

"Well, he's not much to look at!"

"No, poor fellow! But he's awfully hard up, and Mamma always likes to have a lord at her dances, so Papa gives him ten guineas to come-that is, lends it, you know-and a guinea extra for every time my brother Bob calls him Ricky!"

Commercialism in high places offended Punch's notion of noblesse oblige. Much the same sentiment inspired his vehement protest against our selling the house in which Napoleon died at St. Helena for 180,000 francs: "We have an especial dislike to this traffic in a great man's grave. It is turning the funeral urn into a money-box with a vengeance-the vengeance of a miserly shopkeeper." On the other hand, complaints of extravagance and waste, though not so strident as of late years, are freely uttered in connexion with official dinners or loyal demonstrations-for example, when the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Chester in 1869, the Mayor's subscription alone amounted to ￡500.

In the domain of Commerce and Economics no movement in the Victorian age was more fruitful of results than that of co-operation. But a history of the system which began with Owen, took concrete shape in the famous venture of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844-twenty-eight working men with a capital of ￡38-and led to the multiplication of Workmen's Co-operative Societies all over the country, is outside the limits of this survey. The movement came from below; Punch was mainly if not entirely interested in its development as it affected the well-to-do classes by the establishment of "the Stores," and their competition with retail shops, and in the grievances of purchasers and their servants who had to carry their parcels home-grievances which reach their climax in the year 1868. In other words, he approaches the subject as an irresponsible social satirist, not as a student of economics. His pages only show the froth of the movement, not its deep underlying current. So, too, with the cult of Social Science. The periodic Congresses furnished him in the main with matter for chaff, though in 1858 he appeals to the moral engineers of the Social Science Association to devise some means of utilizing "social sewage"-swindlers, fraudulent bankers and trustees. The shortcomings of British cookery always found in Punch a candid critic, but he had no sympathy for those journalists who sought to remedy the deficiency by the publication of elaborate and expensive daily menus. Such instruction was a mockery to the poor who had not enough to eat, and did not know how to cook the little they had.

Banting and "Hydros"

An interesting treatise might be written on Victorian diseases and their remedies. The worship of pastime, exercise and athletics was still in its infancy; whatever its drawbacks, it has undoubtedly given a new lease of life to the middle-aged. Obesity, due in great measure to over-eating and lack of exercise, was the nightmare of the well-to-do, and, if proof be required of the statement, one need only refer to the success of the movement initiated by Banting. Inasmuch as he was a fashionable undertaker-he was responsible for the construction of the Duke of Wellington's funeral car-there was an element of disinterestedness in his efforts to promote longevity. He was also a living example of the virtue of his method, for he reduced himself many stones in weight by the use of non-fat-producing foods. "He had a whalebone frame made to fit his once large waistcoats and coats, and wore the whole over his reduced size-removing this armour to produce a full effect."[14] His famous letter to the Press "On Corpulence" rang through the land: his name was a household word in the 'sixties, and he enriched our vocabulary with a noun and verb which are enshrined in the classic pages of the New English Dictionary, though they are practically unknown to the Georgian generation. Hustle and exercise and nerves have removed the evil against which he warred, and in an age in which excessive bulk is a rarity, the name of Banting has passed into semi-oblivion. But Punch's Almanack for 1864 is full of it and him, and for a good many years Banting was as familiar in the mouths of men as Pussyfoot is to-day.

The campaign against over-indulgence was not confined to an attack on starch, fat and sugar. In the 'fifties hydropathy had come to stay, and in the 'sixties hydropathic establishments were to be found all over the British islands and in America, though the abbreviation of "hydro" was not introduced till later. Fortunes were made-and lost-in these institutions, and they still exist, though some of the most sumptuous "hydros" have undergone curious vicissitudes and conversions. One of the best known of all was used as a girls' school during the War. But the rigour of the water-cure treatment was only enforced in the early years of the movement; proprietors gradually realized that it did not pay to run their establishments as uncomfortable hospitals, and with a laxer administration the whole system fell somewhat into discredit. The convivial Punch never smiled on it, as may be gathered from the verses he printed in March, 1869, when hydropathy was still in its prime, on "Sound Port and Principles." They must not, however, be taken to represent Punch's own views, for he was no lover of guzzling. The poem is really a satire, but it is partly inspired by Punch's inveterate dislike of the teetotal fanatics.

Surgery was active, though the days of appendicitis and adenoids were still a long way off. Punch, however, was more interested in mental maladies and the pathology of the social system. The Victorian age had no monopoly of superstition and credulity, but prophets and spiritualists and diviners reaped a rich harvest in the 'fifties and 'sixties. The comet of 1857 caused a good deal of anxiety, so much so, that in December of that year an insolvent butcher gave as a reason for his failure "the loss he had sustained in June, when the comet was expected, by a large quantity of meat being spoilt." Dr. Cumming was assiduous in prophesying the end of the world, but unfortunately Punch ascertained that the doctor had renewed the lease of his house for fifty years, and the prophet's defence of his action did not mend matters:-

Mr. Punch finds in a Liverpool journal the following part of a lecture which Dr. Cumming has been delivering on Prophecy:-

"He had been, he said, taunted in the columns of Punch with having, notwithstanding his belief that the world was to come to an end in 1867, recently renewed the lease of his cottage for 50 years. The accusation, he said, although not literally, was generally true, but his answer to it was, that a belief in prophecy should not override commonsense. The doctor was frequently applauded throughout his eloquent lecture."

And by no person should he have been applauded more loudly than by Mr. Punch, if that gentleman had had the good fortune to be in the schoolroom at Claughton, where the lecture is reported to have been delivered. The last quoted sentence is so admirably frank that Mr. Punch cannot withhold his tribute of veneration. In other words, although it is all very well, in the way of business, to work the old Hebrew scrolls, which boil down into capital stock for the rather thin yet spicy soup vended by our Doctor, he has no notion of eating his own cookery. We wish we were as certain of our friend's orthography as we are of his commonsense, and would give a trifle (say the next three hundred Tupperian sonnets) to know whether, in his private ledger, he does not spell Prophets as worldly people spell the opposite of Losses.

A SPIRIT RAPPING SEANCE!

Mr. Foxer (a medium): "Oh, dear! There's a spirit named Walker writing on my arm!"

"Diviners and Dupes"

The chief exploiters of credulity, however, were to be found in the ranks of spiritualists, mediums, clairvoyantes and professional somnambulists. Men of science still held aloof from this traffic with the unseen, and its terminology was crude, but the methods and results were strangely familiar. Spirit drawings, forerunners of spirit photographs, are mentioned as early as 1857. Under the heading of "Diviners and Dupes" Punch deals harshly with the advertisements of the clairvoyantes and diviners, and once more returns to his familiar complaint against the harrying of humble fortune-tellers while fashionable impostors escaped:-

The gipsies are hardly dealt with in being convicted as rogues and vagabonds for telling fortunes by the cards or the palm of the hand, whilst practitioners in Clairvoyance get their hands crossed with silver, or with postage-stamps, with perfect impunity. There is clearly one law for the Romany, and another for Somnambulists.

David Dunglas Home, born near Edinburgh, of Scottish parents, and descended on his mother's side from a family supposed to be gifted with second sight, returned in 1856 from America where he had spent his youth and early manhood, and in 1860, when he was at the zenith of his fame, elicited a scoffing tribute from Punch under the heading, "Home, Great Home." The first stanza of this poem, which is accompanied by a picture representing a spirit hand placing a wreath on the head of a lady with a goose's head, refers to Home's famous feats of "levitation" or rising in the air as if impelled by some unknown force. Punch was stubbornly sceptical of the whole business. But if any medium ever deserved the title of "great" it was Home. Did he not inspire Browning to write his famous "Sludge, the Medium"-though Mrs. Browning is said to have been a believer? Anyhow, the list of his converts is too remarkable to justify Punch's contemptuous disparagement. It included Dr. Robert Chambers, Dr. Lockhart Robertson, the editor of the Journal of Mental Science, John Elliotson, a distinguished physiologist, S. C. Hall, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, F.R.S., the Earl of Dunraven, and the late Sir William Crookes, F.R.S. Home was received into the Church of Rome and had an audience of the Pope in 1856, and eight years later was expelled from Rome as a sorcerer-a tremendous testimony to his powers. He married twice into the Russian noblesse, his first wife being a god-daughter of the Tsar Nicholas, and he gave repeated séances before his son Alexander II. The infatuation of the Russian Court for wonder-workers and miracle-mongers was hereditary, and of late years became tragically notorious, but Home was received with equal favour by the King of Prussia, the Emperor and Empress of the French, and the Queen of Holland. The "Spiritual Athen?um" (no connexion, need one say, with the august institution at the corner of Pall Mall) which he founded in 1866 had but a short life, and the gift of ￡60,000, which he received from a rich widow, was revoked as the result of a Chancery suit, the lady alleging he had obtained it by spiritual influence. But we have it on the authority of the D.N.B. that he "was not a professional medium, and scrupulously abstained from taking money for his séances," which answers Punch's sneer at his lucrative traffic with spirits. The writer of the notice concludes with the words, "his history presents a curious and unsolved problem." Taken all round, he was by far the most remarkable personality in spiritualistic circles in the nineteenth century, and "imagination's widest stretch" fails to shadow forth the influence he might have exerted had he flourished sixty years later. Let us be thankful that he lived when he did, and freely own that, if an impostor, he was an impostor of genius and emphatically not a Rasputin.

Mediums and Faith-healers

Alongside of Home's manifestations, the exploits of other Victorian mediums dwindle into insignificance. But they furnished Punch with food for ridicule, as when the Nottingham spiritualists in 1863 suggested the writing of a new Bible from their direct revelations; or when an American clairvoyante published, and distributed in Great Britain, her claims to having made "the greatest discovery ever made," viz., "Mediation Writing, direct to and from the spirit world, in One Minute, without any mechanism, except Pen, Ink and Paper." Her claim to have communicated with Shakespeare gave Punch a special opportunity, for it was the year of the Tercentenary, and the Bard of Avon must have had the whole history of the squabbles which beset that luckless undertaking inflicted upon him by the American lady. More interesting to us, however, is the reference to success achieved by legitimate conjurers in imitating the manifestations of spiritualists. For in 1860 the late Mr. Maskelyne had already exposed the Davenport Brothers, and greatly surpassed any feats they had accomplished in the way of levitation and the materializing of spirit forms. But populus vult decipi: decipiatur; and the game went on. Home was much in evidence in 1870 in the provinces and in Belgravian drawing-rooms, flying "by miracle up to the ceiling, And carrying hot coals on pate or palm, no inconvenience feeling." And in the same year there appeared Dr. Newton, an American faith-healer, or "healing medium," as he was called,

... Out-Homing Home, and curing folks' diseases,

Giving blind and dumb, and deaf and halt, eyes, ears, tongues, legs as he pleases;

By laying his hands upon them, and bidding their ailments begone,

And doing it all for love, and not money-the downy one!

And for all our march of intellect, and our monarchy of mind,

There's never a Reynard the Fox, but he draws his tail of fools behind;

And there's never a quack that quacks, but he finds green geese to echo his quacking,

And never a swindler that lowers his trawl, and finds the flat fish lacking!

"THE OLD MAN OF THE SEA"

Sinbad (as representing the British Public): "I can't be expected to attend to any of you, with this 'Interesting Topic' on my shoulders!"

As Dr. Newton professed to cure diseases partly by mesmerism, partly by the aid of "disembodied assistants," the spiritualist newspapers waxed lyrical in his praise, while Punch contented himself with pointing out the entire absence of any expert verification of his alleged miracles.

If it almost amounted to a privilege to be imposed on by so splendid and well-connected an impostor as Home, the famous Tichborne case exhibited Victorian credulity in a less favourable light. Home's influence was confined to the well-to-do, even well-educated dupes. Though he toured the provinces, lectured and read poetry with considerable acceptance, he was most in his element among the "classes" and in Belgravia. The Claimant's appeal was far wider: he was the hero of the masses and of all the great army of the half-baked. Yet the element of romance was not wanting: there is always something "arresting," as the moderns say, in the emergence of a missing heir; everything connected with the business was on a huge scale-beginning with the physique of the Claimant himself, who weighed twenty-four stone-and at its worst it was far removed from the squalors of "Brides in Bath" and other modern trials. The unshaken belief of the Dowager Lady Tichborne was a great asset; the extraordinary astuteness of Orton in veiling his colossal ignorance and turning the hints of his cross-examiners to good account extorted reluctant admiration even from those most convinced of his guilt. There never was a greater example of the saying that "one lie is the father of many." The force of circumstances was too strong for him. It is generally believed that he would have abandoned his claim long before the first trial but for the pressure of his creditors. He was a seven-years incubus on England, but throughout the whole affair he showed a sort of perverted bulldog tenacity which accounted largely for his popularity.

The notices in Punch begin early in 1867 when, in an illustrated chronicle of the previous month, one of the entries reads, "Sir Roger Tichborne arrived from Australia, after many years absence, and was at once recognized as 'the rightful heir.'" The crescendo of excitement and interest went on for nearly four years before the case came into court. The first action opened on May 11, 1871, and two months later Punch bore witness to its devastating influence on social life:-

GROANS OF THE PERIOD

Vox Clamantis in Deserto:

"Tichborne-Orton-quid refert, O!"

Who, this side the Channel Ditch born,

Can escape the talk of Tichborne?

What would I not give in payment,

To hear no more of "the Claimant"!

Sure as Death to poor or rich born,

Comes the inevitable Tichborne,

Till with cursing, like a raiment,

One is fain to clothe "the Claimant."

To what realm, by wind or witch borne,

Can I flee from talk of Tichborne?

Was life to July from May meant,

To be given up to "the Claimant"?

Patient I've seen ache and stitch borne,

But what's that to talk of Tichborne?

O, ye Doctors, make essayment

Of some cure for chatt'ring Claimant,

Worse to kill than grass called twitch born,

The still springing talk of Tichborne.

All ask what his little game meant:

All are pro or con "the Claimant."

* * *

Unto boredom's highest niche borne,

There enshrine the name of Tichborne;

Crest: two tongues, approuvant, blamant-

Motto: "Rogerne an Arthur Claimant?"

"Poor, Persecuted Sir Roger"

When, after 102 days' hearing, the jury declined to hear any further evidence on March 5, 1872, Punch joyfully recorded "the collapse of an audacious attempt at robbery, supported by one of the most cruel and dastardly slanders ever devised by rogues in council," and rejoiced in the thought that the folks who lent money in aid of the scheme (by investing in Tichborne bonds) had lost it all. The same number contains a cartoon bearing the inscription, "The Monster Slain," showing Punch saluting Sir John Coleridge, who is standing, armed with the Sword of British Justice, on the prostrate form of the Claimant disguised as a dragon. To the dragon Punch gave the name of "The Waggawock"-a "portmanteau-word" compounded of Wagga-Wagga (where the claimant had lived in Australia) and Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwock," and proceeded to dress that prophetic and mystical poem in plain English.

ONE OF THE "SYMPATHIZERS"

Jeames: "I'm afraid, me Lady, I'll require to leave you."

Lady: "Why?"

Jeames: "Well, me Lady, I can't agree with Master's suckasms against that poor, persecuted Sir Roger."

Punch's "chortling" was a trifle premature: two years had yet to elapse before England was finally rid of her "old man of the sea." In April, 1872, we find a picture representing a flunkey giving notice to his mistress, and when asked for his reason saying, "Well, me Lady, I can't agree with Master's suckasms against that poor, persecuted Sir Roger." The egregious Mr. Whalley, M.P. for Peterborough, at a meeting of 3,000 supporters of the claimant held at Southampton in June, spoke vehemently in his defence. There is a statue of Dr. Watts in Southampton Park, and Punch suggested that if these admirers decided to erect one to "Sir Roger" by its side, they should sing, at its unveiling, one of Watts' Divine and Moral Songs which begins:-

O 'tis a pleasant thing for youth

To walk betimes in wisdom's way-

To fear a lie, to speak the truth

That we may trust to all they say.

The "Waggawock" was not really slain until February 28, 1874, when after a second gigantic trial lasting 188 days, the claimant was found guilty of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years' penal servitude. But his backers, mortified by the loss of the money they had invested in him, lent a ready ear to those, like Whalley, who ascribed the persecution to a Jesuit conspiracy. The agitation did not subside until Dr. Kenealy, who had led for the defence, who had been disbarred for breaches of professional etiquette, and was returned to Parliament to advocate the claimant's cause, was defeated by 433 votes to 1 on his motion to refer the conduct of the trial and the guilt or innocence of the prisoner to a Royal Commission. The Tichborne case remains for all time a rich treasure-house of materials for psychologists interested in the Esprit de la Foule; Punch in his punning days would have spelt the last word differently. It also furnishes a conspicuous and ignoble example of the insular detachment which prevailed in a period of "splendid isolation" and non-intervention. At the time when France, beaten to the dust, was agonizing in the throes of the Commune, England was preoccupied and obsessed by this gross and impudent pretender. He certainly made, and unmade, reputations at the Bar and left behind one immortal translation in the course of the cross-examination designed to test his knowledge of the classics-"The Laws of God for Ever" for Laus Deo Semper-but he was a national nuisance as well as a criminal, for he not only ruined himself but discredited thousands of his countrymen whose credulity had been reinforced by greed.

Sport and Pastime

The craze for sensational or dangerous exhibitions so frequently rebuked by Punch in connexion with the performances of Blondin and his imitators cannot be regarded as a specially Victorian weakness. Over pugilism and prize-fighting, as illustrated by the historic contest between Heenan and Sayers in 1860, he could wax enthusiastic. Sayers, by the way, was alleged to have earned ￡85,000 in one year, a sum which compares not unfavourably with the gains of modern champions. It was an age of non-intervention, but more robust in the expression of likes and dislikes, passions and prejudices, and in some respects less humane or refined in its pleasures. Sporting wagers which resulted in the riding of horses to death were growing rarer but had not altogether died out. The noble pastime of Alpine climbing was already established in 1858, but the combined attractions of healing waters and gambling tables were a more potent attraction to wearied legislators of the gilded breed. The manners of the British traveller were not always above reproach, and Punch in his Almanack for that year, employs his ironical method to explain our unpopularity:-

WHY ENGLISHMEN ARE BELOVED UPON THE CONTINENT

Because they are always so careful to abstain from either word or action, which, in any way, might hurt the feelings of a foreigner.

Because they never institute odious comparisons between things in general abroad and those they've left at home, unless indeed it is to the disparagement of the latter.

Because they never brag about the "freedom of a British subject," in countries which are under a despotic form of government.

Because they speak so fluently in any continental language, and always are so affable when publicly accosted by a stranger, and so ready at all times to enter into conversation with those they may be travelling with.

Because they don't bawl for beer at a first-class table d'h?te, nor make wry faces at the wine as though it disagreed with them.

Because they never in the least let trifles put them out, and however much they are annoyed they do their utmost to conceal it, instead of (as has been maliciously asserted) seizing with delight on every opportunity to give their temper vent, and express themselves dissatisfied with everything that's done for them.

Because whatever provocation they may think they have received, they are so careful not to let strong language pass their lips; and so far from making extracts from the Commination Service, are never heard to use an exclamation more forcible than "Dear me!" or "Now really, how provoking!"

A few years later Punch took up the cudgels on the other side, but the rebuke here administered was undoubtedly deserved. Foreign travel, however, was restricted by the passport trouble in 1858, and Punch saw in the restriction a chance for the native hotel-keeper, if he would only reduce his charges.

It was not exactly a temperate age. Heavy meals and copious potations play an important part in Dickens's novels; and a great many men ate and drank a great deal more than was good for them. Abernethy's method of dealing with the voracious Alderman might still have been profitably followed by Victorian practitioners. But we say "men" advisedly, for there is no evidence that women gorged and guzzled, certainly none to support the fantastic account of English dinner parties given by a French writer and reproduced in 1861 by Punch with characteristic comments:-

"At a dinner party the ladies retire into another room, after having partaken very moderately of wine; and while the gentlemen empty bottles of Port, Madeira, Claret and Champagne, it is a constant habit among the ladies to empty bottles of brandy."

The National Type

The extract is taken from a book on Les Anglais, Londres et L'Angleterre, with an introduction by no less eminent an authority than M. Emile de Girardin, who vouched for its accuracy. According to the writer the English cared for nothing but roast beef, porter, and spirits. They were "averse to contemplation," had not the remotest conception of grace or feeling, their "climate, coarse food, and black drink being utterly opposed to any mental refinement. To possess taste it is necessary to possess soul, and a large soul; and the English possess nothing but appetite." It was a gross libel, but the misconception was mutual, and Punch had done a great deal to foster it by his persistent representation of the "Mossoo" as a mere figure of fun. And let it never be forgotten that the notion of the English as a gross and crapulous race was in great measure due to our caricaturists, Gillray and Rowlandson, and even Hogarth. We chose the beefy, burly, sixteen-stone top-booted farmer as the national type, and we have retained it long after "John Bull" ceased to be typical of the breed physically. It became a caricature, but we have only ourselves to blame if foreign artists caricatured our own caricature. The process of the mutual discovery of France and England has moved far since the 'sixties, and has reached its climax (on the French side) in Les Silences du Colonel Bramble, by our good friend M. André Maurois-a work recently described by Mr. H. A. L. Fisher as "the best psychological study of the English character ever written by a foreigner."

Brougham Drives Up-Two Ladies in Toxophilite Costume on the Box, One Driving-Pair of Top-booted Legs Sticking Out of Window.

Driving Lady (loq.): "Oh, Frank, dear, only fancy, George has got so tipsy at the Archery Meeting, that we've been obliged to put him inside, and drive home ourselves-and poor Clara has pinched her fingers dreadfully putting on the drag, coming down Blunsden Hill!"

The social history of any period may be studied in its lions, and, if the truth be told, in 1861 Du Chaillu and the Gorilla loom larger than Darwin in the pages of Punch, though the Origin of Species is described as "a book of much worth." Punch was not much interested in the theological controversy involved, though he naturally made play later on with Disraeli's famous "Apes and Angels" speech at Oxford. Disraeli was dubbed the new "Angelical Doctor," and in a famous cartoon is exhibited as dressing for an Oxford bal masqué, with a contemptuous set of verses on his bewildering versatility, his impartial hostility to Tractarians and Broad Churchmen, winding up with the warning:-

Yet scarce the best mimes can from Nature escape,

And what's simious to saintly brooks change ill;

Have a care lest thou then should be most of the ape,

When most bent on enacting the Angel.

Another and earlier poem is mainly concerned with the lively disputes that broke out between Huxley and Owen and between rival geologists. Du Chaillu's claims were hotly contested; his book was treated by some critics as a collection of traveller's tales, and his meridional exuberance of manner and diction inspired scepticism among some cautious scientists. But Punch espoused his cause-attracted, no doubt, by his championship of Livingstone-promoted the gorilla to the rank of the "Lion of the Season" in May, 1861, and in due course of time Du Chaillu's veracity was substantially confirmed by later explorers.

DRESSING FOR AN OXFORD BAL MASQUé

"The question is, Is man an ape or an angel? (A laugh.) Now, I am on the side of the angels." (Cheers.)-

Mr. Disraeli's Oxford Speech, Nov. 25, 1864.

There were lionesses as well as lions in the 'sixties, and the year 1864 was marked by a new and momentous apparition-that of the American woman of fashion. Hitherto America had sent us only social and dress reformers, but the arrival of the "elegant and fascinating American young lady" was an event which did not escape the vigilance of Punch. The War was still raging, and, as we know, he regarded the antagonists with almost equal disfavour; but towards these fair New Yorkers he bore no hostility, and no fewer than three pictures, all by Leech, do justice to their charm while the legends emphasize the "pretty little Americanisms" of their speech. It is a welcome change from the consistent disparagement of their brothers and fathers from Lincoln downwards. But the great lion of 1864 was Garibaldi, who was given the freedom of the City of London and greeted everywhere with the enthusiasm which he deserved. It was this visit that gave rise to one of Palmerston's characteristic sayings. Someone suggested that they ought to find Garibaldi an English wife, and someone else observed that he had already got an Italian one, whereupon Pam cheerfully remarked, "O that doesn't matter. We'll get Gladstone to explain her away."

"THIS IS THE NOBLEST ROMAN OF THEM ALL!"

ANOTHER PRETTY LITTLE AMERICANISM

Englishman (to fair New Yorker): "May I have the pleasure of dancing with you?"

Darling: "I guess you may-for I calc'late that if I sit much longer here, I shall be taking root!"

Baker and Stanley

Sir Samuel Baker, who returned from his adventurous and fruitful explorations in Central Africa in October, 1865, with his heroic wife and companion of his travels, was the hero of that year, and the lion of the winter of 1873, after his successful but arduous campaign against the slave-traders of the Equatorial Nile basin. In 1866, after Baker was knighted, Punch printed a poem of congratulation to the heroic pair, winding up with the lines:-

Three cheers for the Knight and the Lady so brave,

If Echo's asleep let us lustily wake her;

For none are more worthy of shout and of stave,

Than the Two who ennoble the old name of Baker.

Stanley, whose historic "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" when he found the great missionary-explorer at Ujiji, had been duly chronicled by Punch in July, 1872, found himself famous on his arrival in London later in the year. He was, however, a somewhat intractable lion, and the criticisms of the geographical pundits caused him to roar in a rather formidable fashion. Still he received many gratifying proofs of recognition for his great services. He was entertained at Dunrobin Castle by the Duke of Sutherland; his book and lectures brought him in a handsome sum; and the Queen sent him a gold snuffbox set with brilliants.

The Shah-in-Shah

The last of the lions of this period was the Shah. The lion-hunting of Royalties was always offensive to Punch; it is frequently castigated throughout this period, and here it reached a pitch which moved "the Democritus of Fleet Street" to explosions of sardonic and mirthless laughter. There is true satire in the bitter lines headed, "The Shah's Impressions," in the issue of July 12, 1873:-

Yes! Shah-in-Shah in truth I must be

Or why this fuss of the Feringhee?[15]

Why all these hosts my steps that crowd,

With bows so low and cheers so loud?

If the Inglees Queen, so great among princes

All this respect for me evinces;

If the Tsarevitch, when I appear

Falls flat as the flattest of bitter beer;

If all these Wuzeers[16] and Aghas, and Khans,

For me spend their time and their tomauns[17];

Their parks and their palaces lay at my feet,

Muster for me their army and fleet

And their miles upon miles of merchant ships;

If without their ferashes[18] and their whips,

Manchester gathers and Liverpool runs,

With voices of men and thunder of guns,

To the light of the face of the Shah-in-Shah,

As unto the amber is drawn the straw;

All this is proof in more than words,

I am King of Kings and Lord of Lords!

They told me in leaving Teheran,

Danger of eating dirt I ran,-

That out of the realms of the Shah-in-Shah

I should find rulers called Light and Law.

May the graves of their mothers be defiled

That fain with such bosh had their Shah beguiled!

For the more of these Feringhee Kaffirs[19] I've known,

The whiter to me my face has grown.

I've seen the land calls the Russki lord,

And there the rulers are Stick and Sword;

To the land of the Prusski when I came,

The tongue was changed, but the rule the same:

The stars on the coats may be sown more thick,

But the Prusski's Shah-in-Shah is Stick!

And here in the land of the Inglees

They live and move but the Shah to please.

If my diamonds are as the sun in the skies,

What is the brightness of my eyes?

As in this land there is no sun,

They make a daylight instead of one.

The Queen from her palace for me retires

To Teheran binding it with wires.

Here's Sutherland Beg[20] makes his palace mine,

And all but bids skies for me to shine.

At the Crystal Palace, Effendi Grove

With the rain itself for my pleasure strove,

And out of the water brought the fire

To compass the Shah-in-Shah's desire.

In a wonderful land of wax I've been,

And houris fairer than Heaven I've seen;

To the Inglees Bank a visit I've paid

Where Reuter's gold for me is laid;

And all that have seen me, and all I have seen,

As dust in the path of the Shah hath been,

And instead of eating dirt, I see

But Kaffirs eating dirt to me.

We need not be surprised, after reading this scathing poem, to find that, when the Shah left our shores, Punch had no difficulty in enduring his bereavement with fortitude. The net result, so far as the million were concerned, was the addition of "Have you seen the Shah?" to the catchwords of the hour.

In the eternal competition between London and the provinces, centralization and local autonomy, it was hardly to be expected that Punch, in his jealousy for London, should adopt a judicial or impartial attitude. In earlier years he had protested vigorously against Celtic egotism, when developed at the expense of English sobriety, and the growth of the movement in favour of the vernacular in Wales and the spread of Eisteddfods provoked him to contemptuous antagonism. In the "Essence of Parliament" for May 5, 1862, this hostility is sufficiently outspoken:-

In the course of the debate on Education, the Honourable Douglas Pennant, a Conservative, and member for Carnarvonshire, had the courage to say, that he believed the Welsh language to be the curse of Wales, being the great obstacle to improvement. Of course it is, but while a pack of sentimentalists keep up a twitter about it, and offer prizes for Welsh Odes and such-like Gorilla utterances, how is the fatal jargon to be exterminated? Here's a health to Edward the First, though we are sorry to say that historians now disbelieve that he did spiflicate highborn Hoel, soft Llewellyn, Modred, who made Plinlimmon shudder with his dissonant ballads, and the rest of the Welsh Bards-whose only merit was their having afforded T.G. [Thomas Gray] the subject for an ode that will outlast Snowdon.

The report of the Eisteddfod, held at Bala in the autumn, given in the Oswestry Observer, serves as the occasion for a truly ferocious attack on the disloyal "caterwauling" of the Chapel Bards. In particular Punch is exasperated by the fulminations of the Bard Castell, his appeal to his countrymen to "conquer or die," and his final challenge to the English tyrant:-

We scorn your ways, we can despise your terrors,

Then take your chains, pray keep them for your errors.

Punch's Pet Aversions

For a whole column Punch pours the vials of his abuse on the "humbug" and "bosh" of "Bardery." Some critics declare that Punch killed the crinoline, though he himself acknowledged his failure; he was certainly powerless to check the spread of Eisteddfodau and Pan-Celtitis, and he undoubtedly overshot the mark by the violence of his diatribes.

Pseudo-intellectualism and preciosity were a safer target, and towards the end of this period aestheticism in its earlier stages comes in for a certain amount of satirical notice.

REFINEMENTS OF MODERN SPEECH

Female Exquisite: "Quite a nice ball at Mrs. Millefleurs', wasn't it?"

Male Ditto: "Very quite. Indeed, really most quite!"

Punch's reference to abusive personalities in the Press were no doubt justified, though (as we have seen in his comments on the Welsh Bards) they laid him open to the retort, "physician, heal thyself"; but his withers were unwrung when he assailed the Saturday Review in 1858 for its frigid pedantry; or protested against the maudlin, devotional tone and mock impressiveness of fashionable clergymen; or the vulgar curiosity of snobs at bathing places. The futilities of garrison town life and the dangers which young ladies ran of being entrapped by seedy captains are exposed in the same year, to which also belongs a properly indignant remonstrance with the Lord Mayor of London for advising a thief to enlist in the army, a thoroughly characteristic example of the old middle-class prejudice against soldiers. The humours and trials of studio life play an increasing part in the pictorial side of Punch; they were derived largely, no doubt, from the experiences of his own artists, but the multiplication of these references serves to show the growing social importance of the artist; and the same remark, mutatis mutandis, applies to amateur theatricals. The allusions to club life are fewer than in earlier years, and are mainly concerned with the Athen?um. It is amusing to find the ancient legend of the alleged unsociability of the Athen?um referred to as far back as 1858. The Almanack for that year contains the following: "Imaginary Conversation-Anybody speaking to anybody at the Athen?um." As for Victorian society generally, it would be hard to find a more instructive sidelight on its usages than that furnished by Punch's protest against "the Morning Call Nuisance":-

"Sir," said Dr. Johnson (or might have done so if he didn't), "the man who makes a morning call pays homage to a custom which the imbecile may bow to, but the sensible contemn." In the presence of his lady readers Mr. Punch has not the courage to confess that he applauds the dictum of the doctor. If it were not for the practice of making morning calls, ladies often would be puzzled to know what on earth to do; and Mr. Punch would not debar them from what is, after all, a harmless act of time-slaughter. But he protests with all his might against the notion which some ladies appear to entertain, that their husbands should attend them when they pay these morning visits. It is bad enough for husbands to be dragged to evening parties, but worse still is their suffering when they are cruelly compelled to make some morning call.

"What is always Going On"

Social abuses and grievances and disparities were not so flagrant as they had been twenty years before; still Punch, though no iconoclast, found plenty of scope for his reforming zeal. Cremation was not pronounced a legal procedure until 1884, but Shirley Brooks was one of the original members of the English Cremation Society formed in January, 1874, as a result of Sir Henry Thompson's advocacy of a method which had been neglected in England since Sir Thomas Browne published his Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial in 1658.

In the summer of 1872 Punch printed a list headed, "What is always going on." It is a reassuring proof of the stability of England that of the twenty-six entries exactly half, quoted beneath, are as topical to-day as they were fifty years ago:-

The weather.

The Publicans.

Strikes.

Jobs.

Ireland.

An International Something or Other.

A Big Subscription.

An Inauguration.

A Millenary, Centenary, Anniversary or Jubilee.

A New Daily Paper.

Another English Opera Company.

The High Price of Provisions.

The Albert Memorial.

* * *

[14] See "Bant" in Passing English of the Victorian Era, by J. Redding Ware.

[15] Frank, European.

[16] Viziers, Ministers.

[17] Cash.

[18] Menials employed to apply the bastinado.

[19] Infidels, unbelievers.

[20] Chief or Lord.

* * *

CLASS DISTINCTIONS

In the report, printed in February, 1865, of an imaginary Meeting for Promoting the Education of the Rich, addressed by various artisans, tradesmen, an ex-footman, etc., we read that there was "a unanimous call for a vote of compliment to Mr. Punch for his indefatigable exertions to bring all classes into harmony." Self-praise is a dangerous game, and there were occasions, already noted, on which the verdict of posterity will not confirm Punch's complacency. Yet we have seen that along with his increasingly critical attitude towards the working-man he seldom failed to recognize the need of friendly personal relations between employers and employed; he regretted the fact that in many industrial areas the masters lived away from and out of touch with their men. But the local conditions of the great industries render social cleavage inevitable to a considerable extent; it is in the domain of unorganized labour, and in particular that of domestic service, that class distinctions lend themselves more freely to comment, criticism and satire. Nowhere else are master or mistress and man or woman brought so close together; the crowded life of fashionable society was once described as "friction without intimacy," and the phrase might well be applied to the relations between servants and their employers.

Mistresses and Servants

"Domestic Science" was still in its infancy-the name had not yet been coined-but Punch was deeply interested in the training of girls of all classes in household duties. Throughout the mid-Victorian period he is seldom so serious or sympathetic as when the improvement of cookery is discussed.[21] In earlier years he had been eloquent on the subject of the underpayment of certain classes of servants. These complaints practically disappear from 1857 onwards, though he does not fail to rebuke wealthy mistresses for the scandalously inadequate and insanitary accommodation which was habitually provided for servants in the lordliest mansions. Even the most pampered menials had to sleep in cupboards in the basements or in the attics. But the new note of independence in woman servants is often dwelt upon, and not always in a sympathetic spirit, while in 1861 their extravagance, destructiveness and distaste for needlework form the preface to a noteworthy pronouncement on "Servant-galism versus Schooling," which comes rather as a revelation to those who regard the unpopularity of domestic service as a modern development:-

With an ear to these complaints, and an eye to the instruction of girls in humble life, not merely in the knowledge of how to read and write, but in the useful arts of sewing, cookery, and housekeeping, which are no more learnt by instinct than anatomy or algebra, geography or Greek, a lady four years since established a training school at Norwich, where the object was, she tells us:

"To give the opportunity for gaining a good education, with the addition of plain sewing, mending and cutting out; and also (what every mother was to understand on putting her girl to school) such practical acquaintance with cookery and housework, under my excellent housekeeper, that every girl might know how a house should be kept, and should acquire habits which would hereafter make all the difference between a tidy and happy home or the reverse."

"LIKE HER IMPUDENCE!"

Missis and the Young Ladies (together): "Goodness gracious, J'mima! What have you-- Where's your cr'n'lin?" (This word snappishly.)

Jemima: "Oh, 'm, please, 'm, which I understood as they was a goin' out, 'm--"

(Receives warning on the spot.)

WHAT WILL BECOME OF THE SERVANT GALS?

Charming Lady (showing her house to benevolent old gentleman): "That's where the housemaid sleeps."

Benevolent Old Gentleman: "Dear me, you don't say so! Isn't it very damp? I see the water glistening on the walls."

Charming Lady: "Oh, it's not too damp for a servant!"

The Ignorant Rich

After a trial of four years, the lady is compelled to own her scheme a failure, solely because she found the girls too proud to do the housework, and the parents so absurd as to encourage their refusal. In a letter to the Norwich Mercury, she says:

"I was not prepared to find the class of parents I had to do with would apparently accept the education, but make every excuse to evade the industrial work, or keep their daughters away when it was to be done, and threaten to remove them if the household duties were required of them. In corroboration of this latter fact, I may observe that twenty-three girls have been taken away from the school expressly because they would not do the housework. Whether in the present day girls are allowed to determine for themselves what they shall or shall not do, or whether their parents are too proud to recognize such industrial work as a duty belonging to their children, it is not for me to decide. I can only act on the result, and close my school. I repeat, I should willingly have continued the plan, had I not met with discouragement and opposition from the parents."

But if the normal relations between mistresses and servants were becoming steadily worse, Punch was far from acquitting employers. In October, 1864, the North London Working Classes Industrial Exhibition was opened-for the most part organized by working-men, though sundry rich philanthropists, including Miss Burdett-Coutts, had a hand in it. This prompted Punch to describe an imaginary "Industrial Exhibition of the Aristocracy," and to describe the fictitious meeting for the Education of the Rich already referred to. His report is for the most part burlesque, but Punch puts into the mouths of the speakers a good deal of shrewd satire at the expense of the folly and ignorance of rich people. "They were very ignorant, but that was the fault of their bringing up." The ex-footman, now a small-coal man, thought well of them, but they had many faults:-

They had no regard for truth, and would order a servant to deny that they were in the house when they did not wish to see a visitor. Their indolence was frightful; they would lie in bed until twelve in the day. (Sensation.) It was true, he assured the meeting; and a lady at one end of the room would ring a bell and bring a man up several flights of stairs to fetch her a book that lay on a table out of her reach. Still, they were very kind when they knew how to do any kindness, but so few of them took the trouble to know. As a practical man, he must say that he did not think that missionaries from their own class would be favourably received in the houses of the rich. He would mention another thing, showing the folly of the upper orders. On a freezing night, a delicate woman would change her warm dress for a very light one, put on shoes no thicker than ribbons instead of her comfortable boots, and with nothing on her head, shoulders or arms, would go out and sit in all the draughts of a playhouse, or stand on the landing of a staircase, with the wind constantly rushing up from the street door. What could one do with creatures so hopelessly plunged in folly? (Sensation.)

Other speakers dwell on the lamentable ignorance of plumbing, mechanics and anatomy (from the point of view of the butcher). Punch might have quoted the authentic story of a very clever lady in this period who imagined that a hydraulic ram was an animal.

Another ground for legitimate complaint on which Punch frequently insisted was the attempt to introduce dogma into the sphere of domestic service, as, for example, when a "Christian gentleman" advertised for a lady housekeeper of "decided piety" to keep his house, without any salary, in return for a comfortable home. Punch did not believe in religiosity of this character any more than he could stand the snobbery which relegated servants to the gallery or the inferior seats in church. When a Bill was introduced in the summer of 1871 for abolishing the pew system, he quoted the following speeches from the debate on the second reading:-

Mr. Beresford Hope told this story:

"He remembered having many years ago to seek a church where his household could worship. He went to the individual who let the pews in a chapel of ease near his residence, and he said he wished to take a pew. The man produced a plan, and he selected the one nearest the pulpit and the reading-desk. But, unluckily, he dropped the observation that the pew was for his servants, whereupon the man said, 'You don't mean that you are taking the pew for your livery servants.' On his saying, 'Yes, I am,' he received the reply, 'Then I cannot let it you, for if livery servants were to come to the pew, all the ladies and gentlemen in the neighbouring pews would cease to attend.'" (Hear, hear, and laughter.)

Mr. Henley "did not believe that the humbler classes themselves desired to see the parish churches managed in such a way as to allow the costermonger a seat beside that of a duchess. It reminded him of the couplet which says that:

'Something the Devil delights to see

Is the pride that apes humility.'"

WHAT NEXT, INDEED!

Grateful Recipient: "Bless you, my lady! May we meet in Heaven!"

Haughty Donor: "Good gracious!! Drive on, Jarvis!!!"

(She had evidently read Dr. Johnson, who "didn't want to meet certain people anywhere.")

Religious Snobbery

What Punch thought of this fashionable Christianity may be learned from his truly admirable comments on the protest of a lady's maid in a provincial paper:-

Here is a letter which might very well have passed muster in the (original) Spectator. It is, however, addressed to the Editor of the Hampshire Independent, in which journal it appeared the other day under the title, "Is the Church Free?" The Church therein particularly referred to is the old parish church of Millbrook, near Southampton:-

"Sir,-I saw lately in your paper a very pleasing paragraph, asking for free and open sittings in Parish Churches. Now, as the Bishop is coming amongst us, will you kindly insert this letter, that he may know how proper it would be at Millbrook, where the rich people, who are objecting to a new church nearer to the poor, won't let a servant of any station sit in the body of the church, and we are sent upstairs, if the masters or mistresses are agreeable or not.

We don't blame Mr. Blunt, and we hope the Bishop will ask him about it, and order free pews in the new church.-I am, Sir, etc.,

"August 17, 1871.

A Lady's Maid."

Well said, Mary. Your rich people at Millbrook, some of them, apparently need to be told that at Service in Church everyone is a Servant, and all Servants are equal. Perhaps, however, those rich exclusives attend Church for the same kind of reason as that which makes them go to County Balls, if they can, or would make them if they could. If their church-going is merely an airing of their respectability, it is needless to remind them that a Church is a place where the Presence they are supposed to enter is no respecter of persons. The Bishop of Winchester will doubtless, if possible, not disappoint Mary's hope that he will order free pews, or seats, to be provided in the new Church at Millbrook. In old Millbrook Church, by Mary's account, existing accommodation would be improved on principle by another arrangement. The sittings could be divided into First, Second, and Third-Class Pews.

Class patronage was always obnoxious to Punch, but he was quite ready to admit that the difficulty of getting good servants arose from the impossibility, in most cases, of the lady of the house adapting herself to the peculiar disposition of each one of her domestics. The accompanying advertisement-a remarkably modern achievement for 1865-sounded the note of independence too boldly to suit so moderate a reformer:-

"Domestic Servant.-A Person about Twenty, with excellent character, wishes a Situation where not restricted in becoming dress nor services rendered unnecessarily menial. She would prefer a small Country Family Situation, away from the noise and hurry of Birmingham. Should her mistress prove quiet and amiable, a suitable, respectable, permanent servant would inevitably be secured. Lowest wages accepted, ten guineas."

The Young Lady's grammar, in "wishing a situation," is somewhat arbitrary, but it is enough for her purpose that the reader should know what she means. The restriction in becoming dress probably alludes to the tyranny of a mistress who objected to her china ornaments being knocked down by Betty and housemaid's extensive crinoline. "Services rendered unnecessarily menial" conveys the idea of the wearer of a crinoline being obliged to clean the doorsteps, the attitude necessitated by the nature of this operation being one of supplication so humble, and prostration so abject, as would never be adopted by any wearer of the steel hoops who "could see herself as others see her." The Young Lady would perhaps like to take her quiet tea and beauty sleep in the drawing-room, about four o'clock of an afternoon, talk over family matters with her quiet and amiable mistress, or skim her a few pages of the Court Circular. We sincerely trust that the advertiser has obtained the situation she deserves.

"TRAIN UP A CHILD," &c.

"Mamma, don't you think Pug ought to be vaccinated?"

"What nonsense, dear! They only vaccinate human beings!"

"Why, Lady Fakeaway's had all her servants vaccinated, Mamma!"

Fashions in Christian Names

It was in the same spirit that a few years earlier a protest had been raised against the fashion of decorative names amongst the poorer classes:-

Our laundress's infants have no great charms,

Yet they have a Eugénie in arms;

While Victor Albert swings on a gate,

And munches his bacon in village state.

'Twould be hard to say there is any blame,

There is no monopoly in a name;

But it strikes one sometimes as rather absurd

That contrast between the child and the word.

And what will it be when years have flown

And these finely-named damsels are women grown?

When Evelyn Ada must polish the grates

While Edith Amelia is washing the plates.

AN AUTHORITY

Nurse: "And to-day was little Cissy's birthday; and Sir John, he gave her a coral necklace; and Milady, she gave her a boo'ful blue frock; and as for Mr. James, he took more notice of her nor anybody did, and gave her a sweet kiss! Heigho! Who wouldn't be little Cissy?"

N.B. Sir John is Cissy's godpapa, and Milady her godmamma, and as for Mr. James, why--

This is Mr. James!

It has been reserved for a later generation to witness the appropriation of the homely names Joan, Betty, Susan, etc., by the social élite, while Gladys, Doris, and so forth, have become common form amongst the daughters of Labour.

The Victorian Governess

The month of April, 1872, was marked by two notable meetings of domestic servants, one at Dundee and one at Leamington, at both of which the forming of a trade union was unanimously decided on. At Dundee dux femina facti; and Punch celebrated the event in a set of verses in which the revolt of the "Leamington Flunkeys" is attributed to the alluring example of the housemaids of "Bonny Dundee." The curious will find in the Annual Register for 1872 an account of the Dundee meeting. It had a disastrous sequel in the breakdown of one of the maids who had taken a prominent part in the agitation. Punch comments unchivalrously on the fuss which was made in the local Press over "the hysterics of an ex-servant maid." Modern readers will marvel at the moderation of most of the demands in regard to hours, privileges, etc., put forward at Dundee; but the fact that butlers and footmen had followed suit destroyed any sympathy that Punch might have felt for the movement. The flunkey, as depicted by Du Maurier, is more elegant and refined-looking than the Jeames of Leech, but he continues to be treated with the same implacable ridicule. "Servant-galism" is another matter, and it stands more and more for a claim to consideration which Punch, in his more serious moments, cannot wholly withstand. As against pictures of the "what next, indeed!" type, in which excessive demands are treated with a mild resentment, we have to set Punch's championship of the right to be decently housed, and his reproof of an advertiser who asked for a servant who could neither read nor write.

The gibbeting of employers who offered governesses starvation wages continues, but the entries are far less numerous than in the 'fifties. Still, the evil was not wholly removed. In 1867 Punch expressed surprise that among the many strikes lately witnessed there had not been one of governesses. As a rule, he observes, they are extremely overworked and underpaid, and have really far more cause for striking than the tailors:-

Still, there seems but little prospect of our seeing them on strike while we find them putting forward such advertisements as this:-

"A Single Lady, aged 36, with a limited income, offers ￡20 per annum and two hours' daily instruction to one or two Children in English and the rudiments of music and French, in return for her Board."

We have often known a Governess content with a small salary, but it is a novelty to hear of one content with less than nothing, and even offering to pay a yearly premium for her place. An income which is limited may fail to satisfy the cravings of an appetite which is not; still, unless this single lady be uncommonly voracious, she need scarcely, one would fancy, offer ￡20 a year, and two hours' teaching daily merely for her board.

The treatment of governesses was one of the blots on the Victorian age. They lived in what might be called No Woman's Land. Their status was semi-menial; their salaries were often much lower than those of cooks; they seldom emerged from the schoolroom; they had little encouragement to be efficient; if they were young and pretty they were frowned upon as potential adventuresses; if they were elderly and ill-favoured they were negligible and neglected. The very term "governess" carried with it a certain hint of social disparagement; and they were for the most part the easy victims of snobbery. If proof be required one has only to turn to the novels of the period, in which very few examples will be found of governesses who succeeded in overleaping the barriers of caste and entering the realms of romance. Charlotte Bront?, the pioneer of the "emancipation novel," was perhaps the first to give the governess a chance in fiction. In fact there was not much improvement in the "governess-trade" on the condition described in Jane Austen's Emma half a century earlier, when Jane Fairfax compared it to the slave-trade, "widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where the difference lies." But then we must remember that class distinctions were then much more clearly drawn than they are to-day. It was not until 1870 that the gold tuft on the cap worn by noblemen at Oxford was discontinued. The dearth of army doctors, on which Punch frequently comments in 1864, was due in his opinion to the snobbery of a system which relegated the members of a noble profession to an inferior social status. It was in the same year, to his lasting credit, that Punch espoused the cause of old ballet-girls, with a view to relieving the necessities of worn-out columbines, fairies and sylphs. He was doubtful of the result of his appeal simply because of the self-protective prudery of polite society:-

I know that most rich people have far too much morality to think of doing anything for such people as poor ballet-girls, who are supposed to be descended from some of the Lost Tribes. Of course Polite Society can never be expected to take anything like an interest in persons of this sort. Still, although Polite Society may not feel disposed to help to keep poor ballet-girls alive, I think Polite Society would not be altogether pleased were ballet-girls extinct.

Society and the Stage

The correspondence and controversy which grew out of Punch's intervention is too long to be treated in detail. His statements were canvassed, and the existence of theatrical funds adequate to meet the needs of the situation was pointed out. But Punch was not far out when he declared that as ballet-girls grew old their salaries decreased; it was only by hard work that they earned their living in the playhouse, and they barely escaped dying in a workhouse. The episode is creditable to the humanity of Punch. It is also interesting to the student of manners from the light which it throws on the conventional attitude of polite society towards the theatrical profession in mid-Victorian days. It was a survival of the old view expressed by the Prussian sovereign in an order referring to "singers, actors, and other rubbish." In their proper place-on the stage-they were amusing people. Socially they were outside the pale, living in a state of semi-outlawry, and to be given a wide berth by all self-respecting citizens. Punch, from the intimate connexion of so many of his staff with the drama-Douglas Jerrold, Tom Taylor and Burnand cover nearly the whole period of our survey-never subscribed to this view, though he deprecated mummer-worship as fostering the vanity which was the besetting sin of the actor's calling. He fully recognized the generosity and charity which successful players showed to their less fortunate brothers and sisters. But in the days of which we are now writing Punch did not foresee the swing of the pendulum which resulted in the invasion of the stage by amateurs and the conversion of what had been a social stigma into a social asset.

* * *

[21] The year 1859 is regarded by constitutional historians as a turning-point in our Parliamentary history. Punch mentions, amongst other things, that it was the year in which "the fashion broke out of abusing our wives for bad dinners."

* * *

WOMEN

"Feminism," in the modern sense, as was pointed out in the previous volume, is in English, at any rate, a twentieth century word. Yet the movement was there long before the name was coined or imported, and in the period on which we now enter a notable change reveals itself in the spirit of Punch's dream of womanhood. The change is all the more remarkable when we recall the fact that the paper was still written exclusively by men and appealed mainly to male readers. The first woman contributor with the pen-Miss Betham Edwards-did not appear until 1868. "Mrs. Punch's Letters to her Daughter," however, cannot be said to strike a new note, being for the most part a replica of Punch's own views, with a mild undercurrent of irony so carefully disguised as to be almost invisible. Mrs. Punch disavows all association with committees or causes. She was "not even a novelist"-apparently a hit at Rhoda Broughton, who had recently swum into the ken of the astonished Mrs. Grundy, and whose works are obliquely disparaged under the transparent aliases of "Unwisely but not too well," and "Cometh up as a Nettle." Mrs. Lynn Linton's tirades against the Girl of the Period had appeared in the Saturday Review earlier in the year, and Mrs. Punch follows mildly in the same path, rebuking the extravagances of fashion; monstrous chignons, false and dyed hair, the use of Madame Rachel's cosmetics, and a resort to audacious décolletage. In her advice on the choice and management of husbands Mrs. Punch is purely ironic. There is no serious effort to dislodge men from their entrenched positions as lords of creation. The furthest she goes is in a retort on the Young Man of the Period, whom she boldly pronounces an ass, whether he is of the tame cat order; or an "?sthetic" with a genius for disparaging everybody, especially his elders; or a mere conceited ass; or a clerical despot to whom woman is a ministering slave. Finally she deplores the precocity of the Young Children of the Period. Indeed, there weren't any young children at all, only richly-dressed supercilious little men and women; worldly-wise little satirists and snobs.

TOO BAD

Professor Pumper: "May I ask, Miss Blank, why you are making those little pellets?"

Miss B.: "Well, I don't know. It is a habit I have. I always make bread pills when I feel bored at dinner!"

A Change of Type

But from 1860 onwards one notes an increasing readiness to take women seriously. They are no longer merely regarded as "dear creatures," ornamental and domestic, as when the appearance of The Angel in the House inspired the comment that the title was one "which might be bestowed on a meritorious cook." Blue stockings are still the subject of much acidulated chaff, and "strong-minded" women are almost invariably represented as flat-chested, ill-dressed slatterns. But within certain limits women are allowed to cultivate intellect without loss of angelical charm. The type of feminine good looks portrayed by Leech remained unchanged to the end of his life. Yet in two directions we note a change. His charming buxom girls show a tendency to revolt against the tyranny of their pert schoolboy brothers;[22] they are beginning to cultivate the faculty of retort even at the expense of learned professors. And again, in the hunting-field, the superior boldness of the hard-riding young lady is frequently glorified at the expense of the more cautious male. In this context it is worthy of record that for many years after Leech's death the bulk of the hunting pictures were contributed by the first of Punch's lady artists-Miss G. Bowers.

TERRIBLE RESULT OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN!

Miss Hypatia Jones, Spinster of Arts (on her way to refreshment), informs Professor Parallax, F.R.S., that "young men do very well to look at, or to dance with, or even to marry, and all that kind of thing!" but that "as to enjoying any rational conversation with any man under fifty, that is completely out of the question!"

Du Maurier's Women

Fainting was still fashionable, but women were beginning to compete, mildly but increasingly, in the domain of sport and pastime. Hunting had long been their great stand-by; it afforded women the greatest opportunities for the display of nerve, skill and endurance, and they were as conspicuous by these qualities in the 'sixties as they are to-day. But the Amazon is a class apart. Archery-by reason of its opportunities for showing off a graceful figure as the arrow was "pulled on the tense string"-was still in its golden prime, and croquet so widely popular as to warrant the publication of a long poem in several instalments. Yet the code of mid-Victorian croquet, to judge by contemporary evidence, was not of a high standard. The ladies were charged with habitual cheating. It was a standing dish at garden parties, but, in a phrase of the time, seemed more closely connected with 'usbandry than 'orticulture. Lawn tennis did not arrive till later, and then only as a species of "pat-ball." But women were becoming more active and athletic. We do not speak merely of the professional gymnasts and performers on the tight-rope and the trapeze who emulated the feats of Blondin and Léotard, occasionally with tragical results; but rather of the change in physique and stature of English women. For one can hardly believe that the Junonian types which Du Maurier was so fond of drawing were purely imaginary, or that the gentle giantess, married to the diminutive husband who figures in the domestic record of Mr. Tom Tit, had no prototype in fact. Leech familiarized us with the Amazon of the hunting-field, but Du Maurier introduced us to the statuesque goddesses of the drawing-room, tall and divinely fair. But the debt of English womankind to his pencil went much further than his consistent homage to their beauty and gracious demeanour. He was more concerned to illustrate the taste of their dress than the absurdities of fashion. And above all he never failed to credit them with wit and subtlety in conversation. In sheer buxom comeliness Leech's women were never surpassed, but in elegance and distinction of feature and bearing the types, or perhaps we should say the type, favoured by Du Maurier raised the "social cuts" in Punch to a higher level. It was part of the general movement of the paper from its "Left Centre" position in the direction of the Right, from its aggressive championship of democratic principles towards a Liberalism tempered by an increasing disposition to criticize the working classes. Yet if Punch paid more attention to, and showed more consideration for Mayfair than in his earlier years, the follies and extravagance and arrogant exclusiveness of fashionable women seldom failed to excite his wrath. As he had regarded the decline and fall of Almack's as inevitable, he betrayed no enthusiasm over its revival in 1858.[23] The old oligarchical rule had its merits, in so far as it recognized that money alone was no passport to the revels of the aristocracy. But towards the end of the old régime the barriers had been partially broken down, as one may gather from the verses in which the re-opening of the Assembly Rooms was duly and unsympathetically recorded:-

Sing for joy, superior classes,

But, of course, in tones subdued,

Do not bellow like the masses,

Bawl not as the multitude;

But your joy should be outpoured,

For behold Almack's restored!

There shall Beauty, in exclusive

Circles, waltz again with Wealth,

Sharing exercise, conducive

More to pleasure than to health,

Whilst the sun ascends the skies,

And the common people rise.

* * *

Oh! ye Flunkeys, holloa louder,

Than the rest, for rampant mirth,

In the pride of plush and powder,

You'll attend on Rank and Birth.

How transported you must wax,

Thinking on revived Almack's!

Belgravian Manners and Maxims

The jaded belles who appeared in Hyde Park after dancing till 4 a.m. at Willis's rooms are treated with scant respect, and when Cremorne Gardens were reserved for the Aristocratic Fête organized by Lord Ingestre, a certain malicious satisfaction is expressed that the entertainment was spoilt by the rain. Punch admitted, in "The Cream at Cremorne," that some hundreds of pounds had been raised for charity, but he disapproved of the "exclusive" methods adopted.

The craze for toy-dogs was already rampant. Punch was always a lover of dogs and a good friend of animals, but he detested that form of feminine sentimentality which exalted caninity at the expense of humanity, and in 1858 turned one of Tennyson's lyrics to satiric use in the "Ballad of Poppetina":-

They came and told me where I lay,

Poppetina,

How that my pet had run away,

Poppetina.

With but a feather (as they say)

You might have knocked me down that day,

Poppetina;

I almost fainted right away,

Poppetina.

Amongst the "Belgravian maxims" published in the same year we note two which have not yet entirely lost their force: "We make our money in London, but we spend it in Paris. England gives us meat, and France sends us cooks." Nowadays we still call them "chefs" no matter what their nationality may be. As I write these lines the January sales are in full swing, and the shops of London "ring to the roar of an angel onset." It is interesting, by way of comparison, to give the results of a day's shopping by a middle-class young lady as catalogued in the winter of 1858:-

A TREMENDOUS BAG

Miss Lucy Smith went out shopping the other day, and brought home with her a most tremendous bag. It was so heavy that it was as much as the page could do to bring it into the parlour to be inspected by the ladies. Upon its contents being emptied on to the dining-room table, it was found to contain:-a bottle of Kiss-me-Quick, a pair of white satin shoes, a bulky packet of gloves (cleaned), a dozen rolls of cotton, a paper of pearl buttons (to mend Papa's shirts), a box of cough lozenges, a bundle of violet-powder, a kettle-holder, ten yards of blue ribbon, a pack of club cards, a pair of American overshoes, a pot of bear's grease, a pound of jujubes, a velvet necktie, three cambric pocket-handkerchiefs with "Lucy" embroidered in gay flowers in the corner, a pair of mittens, a small tin can supposed to contain acidulated drops, beads and long pins and gold daggers and imitation coins for the hair, fifteen yards of the best longcloth, a bundle of brushes and small jars of gum for potichomanie work, small curling-irons, several small pots containing perfumes and mysterious volatile essences for the toilette-table, numerous papers of different varieties of Berlin wool with coloured pattern of Brigand for the same, two ounces of shot to sew round the bottom of one's dress, seven yards of edging for night-caps, a set of doll's tea things, two packages of bird-seed for the canary, a bath bun, one Convent Call and Two Fond Hearts, with Ten Thousand a Year. Besides the above, there was concealed inside the longcloth a yellow book that looked suspiciously like a French novel; but as it was hastily snatched up by Miss Lucy, it is perfectly impossible to mention the name of it. Miss Smith was not a little pleased with the results of her day's sport, having brought down every one of the articles enumerated in the bag herself in the space of little more than four hours and a quarter.

Allowing for the exuberance of the satirist, one may still glean a good deal of information from this portentous list as to the tastes of the young person of the period. "Potichomanie" was the fashionable craze for pseudo-oriental decoration by covering the insides of glass vessels with designs on paper or sheet gelatine, so as to imitate Japanese porcelain. Ten Thousand a Year was Sam Warren's once popular novel, one of the first chronicles of the rise of the "bounder"; The Convent Call and Two Fond Hearts represent the appeal of propagandist Romanism and roseate sentimentality. The name of the French novel is withheld; it might perhaps have been one by Eugène Sue. Major Pendennis said that he had not read any other novelist for thirty years besides Paul de Kock, but we can hardly credit Miss Lucy Smith in 1858 with a choice which would be common form for her grand-daughters. Along with frequent references to the ignorance, and extravagance, the frivolity and futility of girls of the upper classes and to the mercenary marriages made in Society, we find an increasing readiness to recognize and welcome the competition of women in the sphere of art. The first Exhibition of Women Artists had been held in 1857; the name of Rosa Bonheur was already so familiar in England that in the summer of 1858 Punch expressed regret that there was "no picture in the Royal Academy of Prince Albert's prize pig by Sir Edwin or Rosa." The Female School of Art and Design at South Kensington is mentioned in 1860, and in 1861 Punch makes a friendly comment on the announcement that a female sculptor, Miss Susan Durant, had "received a commission to execute one of the poetical marbles for the Mansion House, being, so far as one can recollect, the first English lady who has ever obtained a compliment of this particular kind."

Women Artists

In music, women, as singers, had long established their claim to the allegiance of the opera-going world. Their recognition as instrumentalists came later. Punch had missed the first appearance of Mlle. Neruda in 1849, but waxes enthusiastic in 1858 over the performance of Mlle. Humler, a distinguished violinist, "a female Paganini, who pleases as well as astonishes," and in the same year extols native talent in the person of Arabella Goddard, the distinguished pianist who rendered admirable service by introducing the works of Beethoven to British amateurs:-

MR. PUNCH TO MISS GODDARD

A VALENTINE

My dear Miss Goddard;

A creature foddered

On Liszts and Thalbergs, extolled by Ella,

Perceives creation

Of new sensation

When you strike ivory, Arabella.

You've known, Miss Goddard,

What 'tis to plod hard,

The bee must toil ere he hives the mella.

Now, music gushes,

Or leaps, or rushes

To your white fingers, Miss Arabella.

The folks, Miss Goddard,

Who yawn, or nod hard

At tricksters, whack with the umbrella,

When for grand Beethoven

The way is cloven

To English hearts, by my Arabella.

My dear Miss Goddard,

Punch "plies the rod hard

On brass Impostors" (see Swift to Stella),

And for that reason,

Hath praise, in season,

For golden Artists, like Arabella.

The Female Blondin

Such tributes, however, involved no breach with tradition or abandonment of prejudice. The position of women as public performers, whether on the lyric or dramatic stage, or in the circus, was assured and acquiesced in by the general public, always excepting what may be called the Exeter Hall Group, which included real benefactors and philanthropists as well as Chadbands and Jellybys. No objection, however, could be taken to those who sought to restrain the enterprise of managers who engaged women gymnasts to perform dangerous feats. The influence and intervention of the Queen did a great deal in educating public opinion, and the part played by Punch may be gathered from his comments on the tragedy which occurred at a fête of the Order of Foresters held at Aston Park, Birmingham, in July, 1863, at a time when Blondin was drawing large crowds to the Crystal Palace by his performances on the high rope:-

The Foresters of Birmingham, copying the example of the Aristocrats of Sydenham, assembled in a great crowd, on the previous Monday, to see a woman, named Powell, perform some dangerous feats akin to those performed by a man named Blondin. The scene was Aston Park, a place inaugurated by the Queen and Prince Albert, and devoted (as was supposed in this case and in that of the Crystal Palace) to rational recreation. M. Blondin has not yet been killed, but Mrs. Powell's rope broke and she died. She would have been a mother in three months. How the Aristocrats would act under similar circumstances remains to be seen. The Foresters continued their revels, danced, and finished with fireworks. The subject was brought before Parliament by Lord Malmesbury and Mr. Doulton, and the answer of Government is, that no doubt such things are very deplorable, but as the public likes such exhibitions "it is difficult" to interfere, but the Press (to which it is sometimes very convenient for great folks to appeal, and which at other times it is equally convenient to repudiate) is requested to express itself strongly on the matter. We conceive that we do so by simply stating the facts, and adding that the plea of the Government is a most unworthy one. If the very highest idea of a Government is, as Sydney Smith says, a Stout Constable, even that officer should prevent demoralizing exhibitions. Sir George Grey himself could interfere when M. Blondin proposed to carry a child-not unborn-along the Sydenham rope. Parliament would give him a prohibition Bill in three days, if he is afraid to act without one.

As Queen Victoria has been a good deal under the microscope of late, the letter which was written by her command to Mr. C. Sturge, the Mayor of Birmingham, deserves to be quoted:-

"Sir,-The Queen has commanded me to express to you the pain with which Her Majesty has read the account of a fatal accident which has occurred during a fête at Aston Park, Birmingham.

"Her Majesty cannot refrain from making known through you her personal feelings of horror that one of her subjects-a female-should have been sacrificed to the gratification of the demoralizing taste, unfortunately prevalent, for exhibitions attended with the greatest danger to the performers.

"Were any proof wanting that such exhibitions are demoralizing, I am commanded to remark that it would be at once found in the decision arrived at to continue the festivities, the hilarity, and the sports of the occasion after an event so melancholy.

"The Queen trusts that you, in common with the rest of the townspeople of Birmingham, will use your influence to prevent in future the degradation to such exhibitions of the Park which was gladly opened by Her Majesty and the beloved Prince Consort, in the hope that it would be made serviceable for the healthy exercise and rational recreation of the people."

More valuable evidence, however, of the education of the large and growing clientèle represented by Punch is to be found in the recognition of woman's invasion of spheres of activity hitherto restricted to men. In 1859 the telegraph offices are mentioned as opening a new field of employment for women, and in 1860 the subject is discussed, not very graciously, under the heading, "Work for Women":-

What are we to do with our young women? is a question which is now beginning to be seriously asked by the benevolent and by Paterfamilias. Thanks to the prevalent taste for a profusion of finery, combined with a rising Income Tax,[24] girls are getting too dear, that is to say too expensive, creatures, to find husbands. Under these circumstances there has been formed a Society for the Employment of Women. It met, the other evening, at 19, Langham Place, the Earl of Shaftesbury in the Chair. Among various recommendations and suggestions for the accomplishment of its gallant and generous object, Mr. Cookson urged law-engrossing as a suitable occupation for women, described the office established by the Society, which is at present supported by several solicitors, and gave an interesting account of the work done there. Mr. Hastings also spoke of printing as peculiarly well adapted for women, and read a paper contributed by Miss Emily Faithfull on the introduction of women into the printing trades.

Punch and the "Strong-minded Woman"

Miss Faithfull set up her printing establishment for women in the same year, and the excellence of the work of her "Victoria Press" secured her appointment as printer and publisher in ordinary to the Queen. Punch cordially supported the efforts of Miss Faithfull to extend the sphere of labour, still rigorously limited, for working-women, but showed a good deal of the old leaven of sex-prejudice in his comments on her plan to assist the emigration of educated women:-

For ourselves, we would sooner send away the uneducated women, and keep those who were educated in the country. We have not one too many. If, however, by the term "educated" is meant "Strong-minded," we will give our most cordial assent and hearty co-operation to a scheme at once so useful and beneficent, and one that cannot fail to be for the benefit of all parties, as well as a great relief to England. We would advise the Great Eastern being chartered immediately for this purpose, and we do not mind giving a large subscription in aid of it, providing the vessel sails at a very early period. However, we pity the poor colony that receives the intellectual cargo! The only chance of its escaping this blue-stocking visitation is, that the Strong-minded Women may quarrel amongst themselves on the voyage out, of which there is the most natural probability; so that when the heavily-freighted ship touches the shore, there may not be one of them alive, and nothing but their false back-hair, or magazine tales, left behind them. By all means let so interesting an experiment be carried out, and to the greatest possible number.

LADY PHYSICIANS

Who is this interesting invalid? It is young Reginald de Braces, who has succeeded in catching a bad cold, in order that he might send for that rising practitioner, Dr. Arabella Bolus!

Coming to the professions, we find a great advance on the somewhat hesitating attitude adopted by Punch in the 'fifties. In the early 'sixties he avowed himself as a convinced supporter of the admission of women to medical degrees. By 1870 he went so far as to advocate "opening the door of every secular profession to every woman qualified to enter it." He trusted their good sense not to attempt the impossible: "only fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and women, all but very rare mad women, fear to tread the rough ways they are unfitted for." Punch, along with Disraeli, ranges himself on the side of the angels. This marks the high-water level of his recognition of women's professional claims, but as early as 1862 he had registered his protest against the decision of the Edinburgh College of Physicians, when they refused to grant women the medical diploma, by a majority of 18 to 16 votes:-

We are glad the minority was so large, for we think it was in the right. There is no reason why a lady learned in medicine should be refused a doctor's degree. Nobody would be obliged to employ a medical woman in preference to a medical man. It is very true that it is necessary that a practitioner of medicine should be endowed with reflective faculties; but perhaps reason is not quite exclusively the prerogative of man. One or two women could be named whose works exhibit undeniable evidences of some logical faculty and judgment of causation. A female Harvey or Sydenham, or Hunter, or Abernethy would possibly turn up if the portals of medicine were not shut in her face.

The Medical Profession

The rejection of Miss Elizabeth Garrett and other women candidates by the Apothecaries and other medical corporations is unsparingly condemned in the issue of February 22, 1868; but the history of the campaign is written at length in the Life of Sophia Jex-Blake. It may suffice here to add the most notable, and, allowing for a little pardonable optimism, the sanest of Punch's contributions to the controversy in the period under review in this volume. It appeared in March, 1870, in the form of a letter, but here, as elsewhere, the views are clearly editorial:-

The necessity, Sir, of persevering study will, alone, we may be sure, suffice to keep all women out of the medical profession, but a very few. There is therefore no sort of occasion for the opposition to the movement on behalf of their eligibility to be members of that profession, offered, conceivably, by no men out of it but fools, and by none in it but trades unionists. Assuredly, Mr. Punch, rather should every encouragement be given to women desirous to enter the profession of medicine. Paterfamilias is a goose if he do not encourage any daughter of his, endowed with intellect, industry and resolution, who may evince a turn that way. No daughter can Paterfamilias get so thoroughly off his hands as a self-supporting one.

OUR NURSES

Experienced Night Nurse (sternly): "Come, come, sir! You must stop that horrid noise. If you keep wheezing and snoring like that all night, how am I to get to sleep?"

The medical science, Mr. Punch, acquired by a lady doctor here and there might prove a leaven which would leaven the whole lump so to speak, with apology for calling the fair sex a lump. And the lump sadly wants leavening. When it had got properly leavened there would soon be an end to advertisements of "corsets," cosmetics and ways of being made beautiful for ever; also an end of low dresses in high life and high latitudes. The death rate from bronchitis and consumption would largely decrease.

There would likewise be an end of Daffy and Dalby, and all manner of domestic quackery in those upper regions where future men and women make the noises which pious ?neas heard, the first thing, in the lower. Moreover, we should hear much less of those noises.

And mark. Whilst the medical profession would be a resource for a clever girl, who, having to live somehow, would like to live single, or at any rate, having a soul of her own as well as a body, would hate to sell herself in the marriage-market, it would by no means debar such an one, matrimonially disposed, from matrimony. For what young medical man wanting a partner could do better than choose a medical lady duly qualified (in every respect) for partnership? And every non-medical man thinking to take a wife would find his account in taking a doctress who would know better than, by continually breaking the natural laws, to let herself in for everlasting headaches, faintings, hysterics, and other ailments, rendering herself a perpetual plague to a husband, and running him up doctor's bills. Finally, the father of a family of children, whose mamma was a medical gentlewoman, would enjoy the advantage, instead of suffering the expense, of having a doctor always in the house.

That the Legislature will compel the Medical Council to grant a diploma to every lady who can satisfy their examiners is the hope of

Yours truly,

Celsus Excelsior.

The question of the admission of women to the Bar had already attracted serious discussion. In June, 1869, Punch, generalizing from a particular case, expressed mock horror at the prospect:-

THE BAR FEMININE

(Respectfully but remonstratively recommended to the notice of John Stuart Mill)

Is this, we earnestly ask, in the name of cruelty to legal animals, what Court and Clients must be prepared for when ladies are admitted to practice at the Bar?

The Shedden legitimacy case was resumed this morning for the fifteenth time before the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor commented upon the extreme prolixity of Miss Shedden's address, which has now occupied fourteen days, and exhorted her to confine her remarks to the evidence. Shortly after commencing to address their Lordships this morning Miss Shedden swooned, and was carried out. Dr. Bond being sent for, testified that the lady was suffering from hysteria, brought on by nervous exhaustion. Their Lordships postponed the case till to-morrow, when, if Miss Shedden should be unable to proceed, her father will be heard.

Talk of "the Subjection of Women," Mr. Mill! Here's the whole force of Law Lords in subjection to one woman ... who, after fifteen days, talks herself into hysteria, and their Lordships into-but what single word can be found comprehensive enough to describe their Lordship's state of body and mind, under the peine forte et dure of this distressingly fluent female. Fancy a Bar of Miss Sheddens! The masculine legal mind recoils in horror from the idea!

The Suffrage Question

According to the D.N.B. Miss Shedden conducted her case for thirty days. But a few months later Punch, discussing the "Professions of Petticoats," approved of the contemplated innovation, and in 1870 wrote: "Open the Bar, forensic as well as tabernary, only insist on the wig and gown-the regulation gown-let the law of judicial vision be the same for female counsel as for male."

The advance in Punch's education in regard to the most controversial of all woman's claims-that to the vote-is much smaller, but it is an advance. He began in ribaldry and ridicule; but the persistence, the ability, and the high character of the advocates of Woman Suffrage converted him (intermittently) to seriousness, and even respect. The successive stages of this change are interesting to trace. In 1857 a Feminist Meeting at Leicester is merely the subject for chaff. We have noted in the previous volume that Mayfair held severely aloof from the Women's Rights movement in its earlier days. But in the summer of 1858, at the same time when Almack's was revived, the Marchioness of Londonderry and Lady Dysart proclaimed their adherence to Woman Suffrage. Punch, still somewhat democratic, was not moved by this social portent, and when it was announced that the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons was to be enlarged, unfeelingly suggested that it must be a concession to crinoline: otherwise there could be no reason for favouring "a parcel of chattering and giggling women."

In 1859 we find a burlesque account of a woman's meeting, convened to discuss the Suffrage question. But a slightly altered tone is observable in the early 'sixties. Women's indirect electoral power is recognized in the hostile criticism of the Realm, a recently-founded Conservative organ, in the issue of April 23, 1864, and when the question of Woman Suffrage came up before the Social Science Congress in 1866, it is significant that Punch abandons ridicule for argument:-

THE WAY TO WOMANHOOD SUFFRAGE

The cause of Womanhood Suffrage was ably pleaded by Madame Barbara Bodichon at the Social Science Congress, and Madame Bodichon was gallantly followed on the same line by Dr. Mary Walker. It may safely be said that if every man is fit to vote, so is every woman; on conditions. These, of course, are, that if women are to exercise political functions, like men, they must accept all the obligations of the sterner sex. For instance, the right of voting would give women a voice in the organization of the army. This ought not to exist apart from liability to be drawn for the Militia, or to become subject to conscription, if that method of recruiting should come to be adopted in this country. The ladies who sigh for the suffrage should lose no time in enrolling themselves in regiments of Amazonian volunteers to signify that whilst they demand the rights, they are ready to accept the duties of citizenship.

Dr. Mary Walker was the American lady who wore a masculine or semi-masculine garb; Madame Bodichon was the benefactress who invented and endowed Girton.

J. S. Mill on the Suffrage

It was reserved, however, for John Stuart Mill, when, in the debate on the Reform Bill,[25] he moved that in Clause 4 the word "person" should be substituted for "man," to come nearest to breaking down Punch's opposition to Woman Suffrage. Mill's speech shook him very badly, as may be gathered from the full and eulogistic summary in the "Essence of Parliament":-

And now, Ladies, Mr. Punch does you the justice of believing that you would like to know what arguments your Friend advanced. You may be sure that all that could be said was said in the best manner by Mr. Mill, and that such of you as wish to fight the battle may have all the weapons, elegantly polished, at hand, Mr. Punch-your devoted slave-lays them before you in the most convenient form. Mr. Mill urged that at present:-

Neither birth, merit, exertion, intellect, fortune, nor even accident can enable any woman to have her voice counted in matters which concern her and hers as nearly as any person in the kingdom.

It is not just to make distinctions between the Queen's subjects, except for a positive reason.

Are women who manage property, or business, or teach more than most male electors know, unfit for the function of voting?

Would they be revolutionary?

Taxation and Representation should go together. Women pay taxes.

The real difficulty felt is not a practical one; it is only a feeling of Strangeness.

That is a thing which wears off. What are the objections?

1. Politics are not women's business.

2. You don't desire the suffrage.

3. You are sufficiently represented by your influence over male relatives.

4. You have power enough already.

The answers are:-

1. Nor are they man's, unless he is a professional politician. He has business of his own, which he does not neglect, for the sake of voting, more than a woman would.

2. But many do, and others would but for fear of being ill thought of. We are not to suppose that leading questions put to ladies elicit their real sentiments. None are so well schooled as women in making a virtue of necessity.

3. Does man apply this argument to rich men and others with influence?

4. You have great power, but it is under the worst conditions, for it is indirect, and therefore irresponsible. And he would have you work by a manly exchange of opinions, and not by cajolery.

There is a feeling which men have, but are ashamed to express-this:

A woman has no right to care about anything but how she may be the most useful and devoted servant of some man.

Mr. Mill professed such indignation at this idea that he would not argue about it.

In the old days woman and man lived apart-that is, the wife was a plaything or an upper servant. His friends were men. This is changed. The women of the family are the man's habitual society. The wife is his chief associate, most confidential friend, most trusted counsellor.

Then, should a man wish that such a companion should be studiously kept inferior to himself, and taught ignorance or indifference about the subjects among which his highest duties are cast?

The time has come when, if women are not raised to the level of men, men will be pulled down to theirs.

As to women being sufficiently protected, he would like a return of the number of women annually beaten or kicked, or trodden to death by their male protectors-of the cases when the dastardly criminal did not get off altogether-of the cases in which such brutes received lighter sentences than are awarded for trifling thefts.

Old educational endowments were for boys and girls alike. The girls have been shut out, as at Christ's Hospital, where there are 1,100 boys and 26 girls.

The Doctors shut out the ladies.

The painters do the same, excluding them from the associateship of the Academy, because they were distinguishing themselves too much.

A husband can tear away every shilling of his wife's and spend it in debauchery, and even then, if she struggles and saves, he can pounce on her earnings, unless she is judicially separated.

Your Champion, Ladies, wound up with an earnest assurance that when the time should come, as come it would, for acceding to his motion, we should never repent of the concession.

And Punch is sure that whether you want votes or not, you will say that the cheers Mr. Mill gained were well earned.

Mr. E. K. Karslake thought Mr. Mill confounded the distinction between man and woman.

Mr. Denman supported him, but thought the Bill already conferred the suffrage.

Mr. Fawcett (a newly married man too) earnestly supported the motion, and said that the time for chaff on the subject had gone by.

Mr. Laing talked nonsense about the ideal of woman, said that Juliet, Ophelia and Desdemona had nothing to do with votes-the poets understood woman better than Mr. Mill.

Sir George Bowyer, like a gallant knight, supported your cause.

Lord Galway said the motion placed admirers of the fair sex in an awkward position.

Mr. Onslow said that two young ladies had told him they would vote for the man who gave them the best pair of diamond ear-rings.

Mr. Mill was pleased, as well he might be, at the fearful debility of his opponents, and took the division, which was,

For the Ladies 73

Against 196

____

Majority 123 for keeping you out, dears.

This speech of Mr. Mill's was the event of the week.

At any rate it cannot be said that Punch failed to do justice to the debate on its merits. His account is both ampler and fairer than many reports of important discussions in Parliament which appear in the daily press of to-day. But this was the day of verbatim reports. Punch mentions one debate which occupied thirty-six columns of closely-printed small type in The Times.

MILL'S LOGIC, OR FRANCHISE FOR FEMALES

"Pray clear the way, there, for these-ah-persons."

By way of an offset to the admissions made in his Parliamentary report, Punch published a long, open letter to Mr. Mill. The argument founded on the derogatory word "person" need not detain us. The letter is signed "Judy," but the voice is the voice of Punch, who would not give women the vote because he believed they could exercise their political rights of sovereignty more effectually by proxy. Why should they wish to exercise power through the franchise when they were already omnipotent over those who had the franchise? Men were not much the happier or the better or the wiser for their politics. Mill's proposal to exclude married women from the franchise is dexterously turned to account as an admission that female influence was paramount as it was; that it was unnecessary to give women what they already exercised through their husbands. In fine, till women were married, they were learning to rule their husbands. After they were married they had their husbands to rule. Politics were the natural occupation of the inferior or slavish sex. When would Mill's logic open his eyes to the fact that, like the Constitutional Sovereign, la femme règne et ne gouverne pas?

Such a letter brought but cold comfort to the Suffragists. It was like feeding them with the East Wind. But at its worst it was an immense improvement on the heavy facetiousness of Punch's earlier manner.

In May, 1868, Punch virtually sided with his "dear enemy":-

Mr. Mill presented to the Commons a petition signed by 21,757 women, who asked for the Franchise. The first signature was that of Mrs. Somerville, Mechanist of the Heavens; the second that of Miss Florence Nightingale, Healer on Earth. Right or wrong, the request ought to have been granted to such petitioners.

Open Letter to Mrs. Fawcett

So when at a meeting in Manchester in December, 1869, it was resolved to form a guarantee fund of ￡5,000, Punch declared that if the Suffrage was to be had for love or money, women would shortly have it, and went on with characteristic effrontery to claim the credit of being "the Liberator of the Ladies":-

When ladies, ere many months shall have passed over their heads, rush to the poll and tender their votes for the men of their choice, let them not forget to whom they are mainly indebted for ability to exercise the birthright of a Britoness. It has ever been the aim of Mr. Punch to elevate Woman as well as Man. To this end he has directed pen and pencil to the special exposure of the peculiarities which distinguish silly from sensible women to derision. The consequence has been a very general relinquishment of those ludicrous peculiarities, and an awakening the female mind to logical perception, and a sense of the absurd and the grotesque. Hence will sooner or later inevitably result Female Emancipation, for which Female Intellect will have to thank Mr. Punch.

These indiscretions, which were apparently only meant in a Pickwickian sense, obliged Punch to regularize his position in a letter to "Mrs. Professor Fawcett" in the following April. He congratulates the Suffragists on dropping the limitation with which they started and going in for repealing the electoral disabilities of all women-married as well as single. In revising their claim they were at once logical and wise in their generation. But on the broad question Punch comes down on the anti-Suffragist side of the fence:-

Has it never occurred to you that in parcelling out life into two great fields, the one inside, the other outside the house-doors, and in creating two beings so distinct in body, mind, and affections as men and women, the Framer of the Universe must have meant the two for different functions? Can you deny, or shut your eyes to the fact that a similar distinction runs through the whole animal kingdom? Surely, so long as the masculine creature keeps aloof from the domain of the feminine, and leaves to her the nursing and rearing and training of the family, and the ordering and gracing of the home, there lies a tremendously strong presumption against the wisdom of the feminine entry on the masculine domain of business and politics.

The conclusion he comes back to is his old argument: Why give women votes when they have them already?

In a word here is my dilemma, dear Mrs. Professor. Either women don't care for votes-in which case they will make a bad use of them; or they do care for them, in which case they have ours.

Look how you rule in that Parliament for the business of which you do care, and whose budget you control and appropriate. What man dares call his home his own? What man, that deserves to be called a man, with a good wife, wishes to be other than her humble servant, breadwinner, hewer of wood and drawer of water, within the walls of that sacred sphere, of which the household hearth is the central sun? Depend upon it, if Nature had meant you for the franchise, you would have had it long ago. But then, if you had been in our place, we should have been in yours. Do you think it would be a better world for the change?

The worldly wisdom and common sense shown in this letter is also to be found in Punch's review of the whole question of Women's disabilities in the same year. The facetious, patronizing tone is largely dropped, and though the cartoon on the "Ugly Rush," inspired by the rejection of Jacob Bright's Suffrage Bill, clearly approves of the result, it fully recognizes the seriousness of the onslaught on man's monopoly of the franchise. The time for chaff on the subject, as Fawcett said, had gone by.

Short of the vote, however, about which he remained recalcitrant, Punch supported the claims of women to official employment in connexion with the Poor Law, Education, Local Government generally. He bestows a tempered approval on the appointment of Women Parish Officers in Bucks in 1868, and when the first elections to the London School Board were held at the close of 1870, unofficially but strenuously championed the three women candidates-Miss Garrett, M.D., Mrs. Grey and Miss Davies:-

There are some very good men in the candidature, but they are well known, and can speak for themselves. Mr. Punch only wishes to point out that three ladies desire to do Woman's Work, and he hopes that they will be accredited to the Board. He seldom condescends to treat of mere political elections, but these Educational Elections are important, and wise men had better look to them.

AN "UGLY RUSH"!

Mr. Bull: "Not if I know it!" (See Division on the Woman's Vote Bill.)

Mrs. Nassau Senior

The appointment of Mrs. Nassau Senior by the President of the Local Government Board to inspect and report on pauper schools, and her contribution to the Third Annual Report of that Department, meet with unqualified approval:-

In the midst of that vast blue-book of seven hundred pages there is a bit of motherly writing by Mrs. Nassau Senior, which is delightful to read, and cannot fail to be of immense use. Mrs. Senior has visited pauper schools, and has traced about seven hundred girls who had been educated at pauper schools; and her brief biographies of these poor little waifs are perfect in their simplicity. She believes that the Poor Law system will, in time, come to an end through improvement in education. Mr. Punch is not so sanguine. Mendicity is eternal. But the pauper may be gradually raised to a higher level; and such an inquiry as Mrs. Senior's is likely to do great good in this way.

Mr. Punch is delighted when a lady does in this direction what no man could possibly do. The terse memoirs of these poor little pauper maids are much more pathetic than anything in modern fiction. We trace the poor children from place to place-we see them stunted, sulky, squinting, suffering from ophthalmia, the very refuse of the world. Mrs. Senior, kind and keen in her investigations, tells the Guardians of the Poor (who too often deem themselves mere guardians of the ratepayers) how they may gradually diminish this evil. Mr. Stansfeld did a wise thing when he asked her to undertake the inquiry; if the lessons of it are rightly read, her second contribution to the blue-book will have a far rosier tinge.

The treatment of the Higher Education of Women follows much the same course-from ridicule to respect. When a Women's Library was founded in New York, it is seriously suggested in 1860 that a similar institution might with advantage be established in London, with Miss Bessie Parkes, who was an active promoter of the Social Science Association, as Librarian. But when in the summer of 1862 Mlle. Emma Chenu was admitted to the degree of Bachelor of Science at the Sorbonne, Punch contents himself with drawing up a burlesque list of Lady Professors for the University of Cambridge, most of them popular actresses of the time, including Marie Wilton, Patty Oliver, Lydia Thompson, etc. By way of contrast to this carnival of punning facetiousness we may note the rebuke administered in May, 1863, to the students of University College, who hissed the proposal to admit women to degrees.

Girton College

Great capital was made out of "Sweet Girl Graduates" by Du Maurier in many characteristic variations on the "Princess Ida" theme. But the movement was rapidly passing beyond the stage in which it could only be treated sentimentally or in a spirit of ridicule. Huxley was lecturing to women at South Kensington in 1870, and in 1871 the Ladies' College at Hitchin (founded in 1869), which owed its origin to the enterprise and liberality of Madame Bodichon-the friend of George Eliot and the zealous advocate of the improvement of women's position in the state-had so far justified itself as to earn Punch's commendation, under the typically frivolous heading of "The Chignon at Cambridge," a good example of inept alliteration's artless aid:-

At the examination lately held at Cambridge a number of students from the Ladies' College at Hitchin passed their "Little-go"; the first time that such undergraduates ever underwent that ordeal. It is gratifying to be enabled to add, that out of all those flowers of loveliness, not one was plucked. Bachelors of Art are likely to be made look to their laurels by these Spinsters, and Masters must work hard or they will be eclipsed by Mistresses, more completely than the Sun was the other day by the Moon. And we may expect that when such competitors of both sexes come to perform upon the classical and mathematical Tripos, a Pythoness will be first upon the former, and another young lady will dance off triumphantly Senior Wrangler.

SWEET GIRL GRADUATES-AFTERNOON TEA VERSUS WINE

Punch's prophecy was fulfilled by the exploits of Miss Ramsay (afterwards Mrs. Montagu Butler) and Miss Philippa Fawcett, daughter of Henry and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. The College at Hitchin was moved to Cambridge in 1873, when it entered on a new and prosperous career under the title of Girton. But Punch, reverting to his facetious manner, availed himself of the opportunity to publish a set of burlesque regulations and syllabus of lectures for the new College. The same spirit is betrayed in the comments on the proposed Ladies' Club in 1869:-

A Ladies' Club is said to be in process of formation. How the male mind shudders at this most tremendous news! What a field for fearful questions the intelligence suggests! Will there be a Club Committee? and, if so, at its meetings how many ladies' tongues will be allowed to speak at once? Will there be a smoking-room? And, if so, will cigars be suffered to be lighted, or will the fear of being ill restrain the ladies from indulgence in anything except the very mildest cigarettes? Will conversation be restricted to the politics of the nursery and the latest news in bonnets; or what will be the limits sanctioned to recounters of a thrilling bit of scandal, or to narrators of a tale of love, or marriage, or divorce, which has just been set a-wagging in high life? Instead of billiards we presume the younger members will amuse themselves with tatting, while the elder are engaged in a fierce battle at Bézique....

The ladies will, of course, want a title for their Club. Perhaps "The Femineum" would be a fitting name for it; or would its members prefer to call themselves "The Chatterers" while the present fashion lasts? Should the Ladies' Club prove popular, there may doubtless be some little ducks desirous to belong to it. But we trust, however silly may be certain of its members, nobody will ever dream of calling it "The Goose Club."

The promoters might have retorted that such criticisms were worthy of the members of the "Asineum." But Punch was fairly entitled to make such capital as he could out of the advertisement quoted in 1874: "Philosopher wanted, as Secretary to a Ladies' Club."

The Economics of Marriage

As we have seen, Punch had frankly recognized that matrimony was not and could not be the be-all and end-all of all women-that there were some girls who, though they might marry if they chose, did not wish to; girls who preferred independence to matrimonial servitude; girls, again, who would make excellent wives, but were not chosen because men were stupid enough to be governed in their choice by looks and looks alone. The economics of marriage, again, were becoming an increasingly important consideration as a result of the raising of the standard of life and the cost of living. In the 'forties Punch printed a song of which the refrain was "If I had a thousand a year," which represented a sum almost beyond the dreams of middle-class avarice, to judge by all the things the dreamer would do and all the luxuries he would indulge in, if his income reached four figures. In 1858 The Times started a serious discussion of the problem "Marriage on ￡300 a year," which the same audience nowadays would regard not as practical politics but an act of insanity. Punch, however, satirized the discussion from the point of view of an agricultural labourer earning a wage of 10s. a week.

Though in the golden days of Gladstonian finance the income tax came down to 4d. and even 3d. in the pound, the standard of living rose, and ￡500 a year is mentioned in 1867 as a possible basis for matrimony. From whatever the cause-possibly the prevalence of large families had something to say to it-the rapidity with which married people of both sexes grew old, as compared with the juvenile grandparents of to-day, is strikingly illustrated in the pages of Punch. Take for example the two pictures "Twelve months after Marriage" and "Twenty years after Marriage" in 1862. When we take into account the earlier age at which people married sixty years ago, the couple in the picture on p. 265 need no be more than forty-five; yet they both look at least seventy. One is reminded of a passage in Sense and Sensibility (though, that, of course, was fifty years earlier), in which John Dashwood, speaking of his mother, who is "hardly forty," suggests that "she may live another fifteen years." The pictures given here represent a happy marriage. Punch had no panacea for unhappy marriages; but he remained of the same opinion, so often expressed in his earlier days, that a cheap Divorce Act was a better cure than the punishment of cruel wife-beaters. And throughout this period he remained constant in his support of the campaign for the amendment of the Women's Property Acts, on the lines of his summary of Lord Brougham's three resolutions moved in the House of Lords on February 13, 1857. They were "First, that their present rights were all wrongs. Second, that a woman was entitled to her own property; and third, that if our ridiculous theory of marriage prevented a woman from having this justice, at all events a profligate husband should be restrained from wasting her possessions." Lastly, he remained unshaken in his adhesion to the cause of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, or, as he termed it, "the Bill for Emancipation of Sisters-in-Law from the tyrannical disqualification which prevents their taking the matrimonial oath when elected by a Briton and a widower."

TWELVE MONTHS AFTER MARRIAGE

"Bobby ought to love his pet for taking such care of his beautiful whiskers."

The English Feminine Type

By way of conclusion we may add that if Punch reserved to himself the right of castigating the follies of his countrywomen, he was valorous in their defence when they were depreciated or caricatured by foreign critics or artists. In 1858 he falls foul of a German journalist, under the head of "British and German Beauty":-

The Berlin Charivari contains the following humorous remarks on English beauty:-

"Each Nation thinks itself the handsomest in the world. We paint the devil black; the blacks will have him white. Miss Pastrano delights in her beard, and every Englishman thinks his red-haired, crooked-nosed, rabbit-toothed, goggle-eyed, loose-legged, calfless Dulcinea the very perfection of human beauty."

Not quite that. Not so perfect as the raven-haired, Grecian-nosed, white-and-sound-toothed, sloe-eyed, neat-legged young Teutonic lady, with such pretty little feet and ankles at the end of her legs. Of course the Prussian Charivari's notion of an English girl is a bit of fun, complimentary irony; and we are sure our fair countrywomen will feel highly honoured by the mock-depreciation of our cousin German.

Much later on the French caricaturists, who habitually represented Englishwomen as lean, gaunt, ill-favoured and ill-dressed, and with long projecting teeth, roused him to protest with equal vigour against their gross and unseemly libels.

TWENTY YEARS AFTER MARRIAGE

"My dear Bobby, you must let me pull it off your nose; it looks so ugly."

* * *

[22] The "tyranny of the younger brother" who is continually harassing his grown-up sisters was undoubtedly one of the results of the customary large families of the period. In Leech's pictures, again, the tender passion is nearly always illustrated by passages between cousins.

[23] Yet Sir Henry Holland, the distinguished physician, states in his Reminiscences (1872) that he knew of cases, which had defied medicine, being cured by a ticket for Almack's.

[24] The income tax was then only 10d. in the pound over ￡150.

[25] May 20, 1867.

* * *

LITERATURE

There is probably no better means of testing a man's literary sense than his estimate of poetry other than that written by authors of established reputation. And as with individuals so is it with papers. Punch deserves no special credit for his devotion to Shakespeare, or for his ridicule of the Baconians who, in his phrase, sought to make the Swan of Avon a Goose. It is curious, however, in this context to note that, on Punch's authority, Lord Palmerston suspended judgment on the question. In the arm-chair commentary on current events which appeared in 1865 under the heading, "Punch's Table-Talk," we read:-

When Ben Jonson's verses, in laudation of William Shakespeare, were mentioned to the late Premier, he said, "Oh, these fellows always stand up for one another. Besides, he may have been deceived like the rest."

It is only one and a small proof of Shakespeare's "myriad-mindedness" that Punch throughout his career has drawn more freely from his plays for subjects for cartoons than from any other source. Shakespeare, as a modern writer puts it, "has always been there before." It was partly no doubt due to Punch's distrust of the national capacity to organize and carry out picturesque demonstrations that led him to treat the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebrations in 1864 with scant respect. But an honourable jealousy for the repute of our greatest writer was enough to warrant his dissatisfaction. There were wide divergences of opinion and considerable friction among the members of the National Memorial Committee, a huge unwieldy body representing all professions and interests, and containing, along with many great and honoured names, not a few thrusting notorieties and even nonentities. The festival at Stratford was a fiasco, and the grandiose schemes of the promoters came to little practical result. One is indeed tempted to draw the conclusion that it is almost unnecessary to attempt a special celebration of one who is being celebrated every day and all the time.

SHAKESPEARE AND THE PIGMIES

As a critic of letters Punch is subjected to more searching ordeal in his references to living and rising than to dead or risen authors. His recognition of James Montgomery-the author of one of the very few fine modern hymns-has been noticed elsewhere. There was chivalry as well as appreciation in his defence of Alexander Smith when the charge of plagiarism was brought against the "City Poems" by the Athen?um. The ridicule of the "Spasmodic" school in Aytoun's brilliant burlesque drama Firmilian was a much more damaging criticism, but in recognizing Smith's force and originality Punch ranges himself on the side of Clough and Matthew Arnold, John Forster, Arthur Helps and G. H. Lewes-in other words, the most enlightened and best equipped critics of the time.

Though Tennyson had been Laureate for several years, he was still regarded-surprising and even painful as it may seem to the neo-Georgian reader-with a certain amount of suspicion by austere critics bred up in eighteenth century traditions. Both as regards matter and manner he was considered to be an innovator. Punch's admiration for Tennyson was already an old story. He had lent him the hospitality of his pages in 1846 to reply to Bulwer Lytton's defamatory abuse in The New Timon. But in some quarters judgment was still suspended, and Tennyson was not yet held to have completed the period of probation. So when in 1859 the bust of the Laureate was denied admission to the Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, on the ground that the honour was premature, Punch printed a satirical "Fragment of an Idyll" in which the poet's detractors were rebuked in his own manner.

A Wonderful Three-penny-worth

Punch's championship of Tennyson never faltered, though he was reconciled to Bulwer Lytton, who had called the Laureate a "School-miss," and it dated back to a time when Tennyson's claims to recognition were vehemently canvassed. Still we are inclined to regard as a much more remarkable sign of his flair and enlightenment, the quoting of Meredith's poem, Modern Love, in his "Essence of Parliament," in the year 1865. It is only a scrap-four words; yet when one remembers how remarkably small Meredith's audience was in the 'sixties, even for his prose, the quotation is a notable sign of grace. But Shirley Brooks, who distilled the "Essence," was a scholar and something of a poet into the bargain. There was also a special bond between Punch and George Meredith. In 1860, under the heading "An Honest Advertisement," Punch refers to Once a Week as having been enlarged to thirty-two pages, and speaks of it as "already one of the most extraordinarily cheap publications in the world when you consider the brilliancy of the literature and the beauty of the illustrations." This was admittedly a puff, for the proprietors of Punch and Once a Week were the same, but it was no more than the truth. Once a Week was the most wonderful three-penny-worth in the whole journalistic history of the nineteenth century, with Millais, Rossetti, Sandys, Frederick Walker, G. J. Pinwell and Charles Keene as regular illustrators. As for the letterpress, it is enough to say that Meredith's Evan Harrington (illustrated by Charles Keene) appeared in its pages, as well as many of his and Tennyson's poems. In spite of this galaxy of talent the magazine was not a commercial success, and after a few years passed into other hands.

In extending a welcome to Kingsley's[26] Water Babies, and later on to Alice in Wonderland, our friend Punch did no more than might have been expected of him. But his praise of the former story is pitched in a pretty high key: the author of the "Table Talk" in 1865 declaring that he "would rather have written the Water Babies than any book in the last fifty years." In the controversy that raged over Poems and Ballads, in 1866, Punch committed himself truculently to the side of the angels of decorum. In consequence he writes pungently, that "having read Mr. Swinburne's defence of his prurient poetics, Punch hereby gives him his royal licence to change his name to what is evidently its true form-"Swine-born." Name-twisting, with a view to casting odium on an antagonist, is an old but dangerous game. The most that can be said in Punch's defence, which is not much, is that he was not the only offender. In the acrimonious pamphlet warfare that raged between Swinburne and Dr. Halliwell Phillipps, the latter called the poet "Pigsbrook," and the poet retorted by referring to his opponent as "Hell-P." Apart from this error of taste, Punch had at least the support of powerful and distinguished allies in his condemnation. But he overdid his disparagement when four years later he observed that "certain Songs before Sunrise are promised us ere long, from the pen of a young poet." Nor was the allusion to Walt Whitman as "an impostor" in 1869 any happier than his previous description of him as a Yankee rough.

Martin Tupper

Though by no means an infallible or judicial critic, Punch made no mistakes about bad poets, even though they were popular. Throughout this period he was the champion of the middle-classes in politics; but his championship did not extend to their literary preferences. In the 'sixties, Tupper was widely read and, judged by circulation, the most successful poet of the day. To this generation his name has become a synonym for platitude; and as an author, he survives, if at all, in the immortal parody of Calverley. Yet we can never get away from the fact that he gave pleasure to scores of thousands of decent people by his blameless banalities. Though his Proverbial Philosophy was the quintessence of commonplace and orthodoxy, there are passages in it, as Professor Elton has pointed out, which deviate into something like poetry. He was, though vain, a kindly, good man, and a patriotic citizen, who did good service in promoting the Volunteer Movement. He was not a fool: did he not defeat Mr. Gladstone in the competition for a prize for a theological essay at Christ Church? The University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of D.C.L. in 1847. He was also an inventor in a small way, and patented a screw-top for glass bottles. He was even a Fellow of the Royal Society! But to Punch he was simply a bad poet, and as such a subject for ridicule and parody. Thus, à propos of his Three Hundred Sonnets, Punch published in 1860 what purported to be the three-hundred-and-first on "My Five New Kittens," winding up with the couplet:-

O cook, we'll keep the innocents alive,

They're five, consider, and you've fingers five.

The illustration alluding to a girl who writes to her lover with the aid of "Tupper's poems and a Dictionary," acquires a peculiar point from the fact, recorded in Spurgeon's Life, that he proposed to the lady who became his wife by help of a passage from Tupper.

SHE "JESTS AT SCARS--."

Aunt: "And how's Louisa, my dear? Where is she?"

Sarcastic Younger Sister (fancy free): "Oh, pretty well, but she won't be on view these two hours. She's writing to her 'Dear Fred'; at least, I fancy I saw her come out of the library with Tupper's poems and a Dictionary!!"

Owing to heavy financial losses Tupper accepted a Civil List pension of ￡120 at the end of 1873, and Punch supported the grant on the ground that though philosophers might have learned little from Proverbial Philosophy, there could be no doubt that a work read by the million had either taught or entertained them a good deal. He also hailed it as an earnest of better times coming for authors in general; for if Tupper had received ￡120 a year, how many times that sum should be awarded to writers of really durable works? This mitigated approval prepares us for Punch's subsequent malice in publishing a burlesque poem, purporting to come from Tupper's pen, on a Royal wedding in January, 1874. But the bestowal of those pensions too often invited direct censure. The notorious "Poet Close" of Kirkby Stephen, Westmorland, who described himself as "Poet Laureate to the King of Bonny," was patronized by Lord Palmerston (who indirectly compared him with Burns) and had been put on the Civil List in 1861, though the pension was afterwards withdrawn. But when Punch learned in 1863 that the poet was poor in more senses than one, he promised him an immunity from ridicule, and wished success to his next work. The promise was hardly fulfilled in the following year when "English literature was enriched" by Poet Close's Grand Sensation Book and by Cithara-a selection from the Lyrics of Martin Tupper. Of the latter Punch cruelly remarks: "it contains some new pieces, in which Mr. Tupper has excelled himself: but Nemo repente fuit Tupperrimus." The two poets are bracketed (as in one of Gilbert's Bab Ballads) in some ironical stanzas, but the conjunction was hardly fair to Tupper, who at his worst was assuredly a cut above "Poet Close." A lower depth, however, was sounded by the poet Young, whose pension was a positive scandal. Tupper is very generously treated in the D.N.B.; "Poet Close" appears, though more as a curiosity than as a writer of any literary merit whatsoever, his verses being described as "metrical balderdash"; but for Young we have to go to Hansard or Punch, whose comment in 1867 runs as follows:-

We had some fun by way of ending an important week. Palmerston had his Close, and Derby has his Young, only the doggerel of the latter is not merely vulgar and foolish, but offensive. However, he is pensioned. Mr. Whalley (probably thinking that Young was author of the Night Thoughts) defended the grant, and said that Young's sentiments were truly Protestant. Mr. Disraeli said what he could, which was that Lord Derby had been hoaxed, and that it would be a warning to himself never to sign or believe in a Memorial.

The vigilance displayed by Punch in this matter no doubt helped to improve matters, but even as I write, in 1921, the world of letters has been staggered by the bestowal of a decoration on the strength of literary achievements of which no record could be discovered in any publisher's catalogue or library.

Thackeray and Dickens

One of the great novelists of the Victorian Age, Thackeray, had been for many years a regular and brilliant contributor to Punch, and though he retired from the staff in 1854, remained a constant member of the council and sat with them only eight days before his death on Christmas Eve, 1863. The tribute in the issue of January 2, 1864, pays homage more to the affectionate and loyal comrade than to the great writer; but in the following number Punch repels with spirit the charge that Thackeray was a cynic. Thackeray's contributions to Punch belong to an earlier period, but the brilliant burlesques of popular novelists, which he initiated by his travesties of Bulwer Lytton, Disraeli, G. P. R. James and Lever were carried on with great spirit by Burnand in Mokeanna (suggested by the romances in the London Journal), Chikkin Hazard (founded on Charles Reade's Foul Play), and One and Three (after Victor Hugo's Quatre-Vingt-Treize). Burnand's burlesques were not nearly so subtle or artistic as Thackeray's; they relied more upon farcical quips and ingenious puns; but still they served a useful purpose in the elevation of parody from mere verbal mimicry into a genuine function of literary criticism, a process in which Punch has played an increasingly active and successful part in recent years.

Dickens's intimate relations with the Punch staff have been noted in the previous volume. There had been friction with the proprietors, but all was forgotten on his death in June, 1870. The lines which recognize him as in the same category as Shakespeare, only say what even modernist critics admit to-day-that he created a new world and peopled it with creatures of his imagination who are as real as those of real life. In the same number Punch, with some slight reserves, espoused Disraeli's side when Goldwin Smith had rashly "put on the cap" fitted for him in Lothair, and publicly and vehemently protested against being libelled as a "social parasite." In some doggerel verses Punch made acid reference to the professor's bilious temper, intellectual arrogance and general cantankerousness. If Disraeli's attack was cowardly and contemptible, why notice it with such passion?

A NOVEL FACT

Old-fashioned Party (with old-fashioned prejudices): "Ah! Very clever, I dare say. But I see it's written by a lady, and I want a book that my daughters may read. Give me something else!"

Trollope is genially commended in the "Honest Advertisement" mentioned above. The popularity of Miss Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd is attested in 1863; Miss Broughton's novels are barely referred to, but the reference clearly indicates disapproval of their audacity. Nor can we find any appreciation of the now unduly neglected novels of George Eliot, though there is a curious mention in 1859 of an anonymous sequel to Adam Bede brought out by an obscure publisher named Newby. It may be recalled that a claim to the authorship of Adam Bede was set up on behalf of a Mr. Liggins, a gentleman as unscrupulous as his name was unromantic.

Carlyle and Ruskin

The imposture caused great annoyance to the real author, and hastened the divulging of the secret which had hitherto been well kept.

Punch had welcomed Macaulay's peerage, and on his death at the end of 1859 spoke of his as "the noblest name our Golden Book could show." In spite of occasional sharp divergences of opinion, Carlyle is nearly always treated with honour and respect. When he was elected Lord Rector of Edinburgh University in 1866, Punch saluted him in his own peculiar style as a "brave, wise old man" who in an age of "eternal butter and testimonial-plasterings of mediocrity," had flagellated windbags, scourged sham patriotism, spoken words of manly cheer, and in general shown that the root of the matter was in him. Punch's further salute in 1874 when "the Prussian Royal Order of Merit was presented to the English historical biographer of Frederick the Great," is pitched in a key that jars on modern ears by its eulogy of Bismarck and the Emperor William; but the last stanzas of "True Thomas and his Order" are worth quoting:-

Our mother England has no stars

For soldiers of the Pen:

With us such honours spring from wars

Watered with blood of men.

Then let us rather smile than sneer,

When from the Vaterland,

Whose thought to us he has brought near,

There is stretched forth a hand,

To pin the badge of merit fair

On Carlyle's manly breast:

The star can shed no honour there,

'Tis honoured there to rest.

The only other great Victorian literary lion of whom mention is made is Ruskin, and Punch's attitude towards him is somewhat mixed. In 1871 he addressed an open letter to Ruskin, à propos of his suggestions for preventing inundations of the Tiber, the gist of it being that, whatever he might be as an art critic, he was not infallible as an engineer. Punch admitted the "mystical and musical" eloquence of Ruskin, whom he was quite content to regard as an oracle-though not always intelligible-on Art and Nature, Paintings Old and Modern, Lamps of Architecture, Crowns of Wild Olive, and so forth, but he refused to take him seriously as a writer on economics or social problems. He showed unexpected sympathy with him, however, over the famous road-making experiment in 1874 at Hincksey, when the not very expert efforts of his disciples moved Philistine undergraduates to ribald mirth:-

HINCKSEY DIGGINGS

(See recent Correspondence in Daily News, and elsewhere)

'Tis well for snarlers analytic,

Who the art of the snarl to the sneer have brought,

To spit their scorn at the eloquent critic,

Leader of undergraduate thought.

Heart of the student it will not harden

If from the bat and the oar he abstain,

To plant the flowers in a cottage garden,

And lay the pipes of a cottage drain.

Pity we have for the man who thinks he

Proves Ruskin fool for work like this.

Why shouldn't young Oxford lend hands to Hincksey,

Though Doctrinaires may take it amiss?

Careless wholly of critic's menace,

Scholars of Ruskin, to him be true;

The truths he has writ in The Stones of Venice

May be taught by the Stones of Hincksey too.

Other papers laughed at the "amateur navvies," Oxford caricaturists were busy, and "to walk over to Hincksey and laugh at the diggers became a fashionable afternoon amusement." But the road was wanted, and Ruskin, according to his biographer,[27] saw in it a means of practical protest against the fetish-worship of athletics, to say nothing of his probable desire to dissociate himself from the Postlethwaites and Maudles who had stolen some of their catchwords from Ruskin, but whose creed of "art for art's sake" he cordially loathed. And perhaps the best vindication of the experiment was the fact that the undergraduate road-diggers included Alfred Milner and Arnold Toynbee; and that in encouraging his disciples in the "gospel of labour" Ruskin formulated principles of social service on lines which have been faithfully carried out in the Universities' Settlements in East London and other cities.

Punch and American Humorists

American humour is not always to English taste. And, conversely, English humour, as represented by Punch, has not always commended itself to American critics, though nothing could be more generous than the tribute to Punch paid by New York Life during the late war. At an earlier date we remember a picture in an American comic journal representing a room of torture, crowded with thumbscrews and racks and other engines of malignity, with a pile of volumes of Punch enthroned in the place of honour. In this context one recalls with satisfaction that Punch extended a cordial welcome to two great American humorists-Artemus Ward and Mark Twain-in the 'sixties and early 'seventies. Artemus Ward was in broken health when he visited our shores in 1866, but his lectures at the Egyptian Hall were an immense success, and elicited the admiration of such diverse critics as John Bright, Richard Holt Hutton, of the Spectator, who wrote an admirable appreciation of them in his paper, and Punch. Hutton once told the present writer that he was never so convulsed with laughter in his life as when listening to the lecture. It may be read in Artemus Ward's collected works, and it is very good reading in cold print, but the effect was enormously enhanced by the contrast between the lecturer's cadaverous appearance and melancholy manner on the one hand, and the extravagant farce of his utterances on the other. This is well brought out in Punch's notice of "A Ward that deserves watching":-

Mr. Punch would recommend "funny men" on or off the stage, to hear Artemus Ward "speak his piece" at the Egyptian Hall, and then, in so far as in them lies, to go and do likewise....

Oh, if these unhappy abusers of gag, grimace, and emphasis-these grating, grinding, grinning, over-doing obtruders of themselves in the wrong place-could take a leaf out of Artemus Ward's "piece," and learn to be as quiet, grave, and unconscious in their delivery of the words set down for them as he is in speaking his own! Unlike them, Artemus Ward has brains. That is, of course, beyond hope in their case. But if they could once be made to feel how immensely true humour is enhanced by the unforced way it drops out of A.W.'s mouth, they might learn to imitate what, probably, it is hopeless to expect they could understand.

To be sure, Artemus Ward's delivery of fun is eminently "un-English." But there are a good many things English one would like to see un-Englished. Gross overdone low comedy is one of them. Snobbishness is another. The two go hand in hand. One of the best of many good points of Artemus Ward's piece is that it is quite free from all trace of either of these English institutions. And it is worth noting, that we owe to another native of the States, Joseph Jefferson, the best example lately set us of unforced and natural low comedy. His Rip Van Winkle was very un-English, too.

Artemus Ward in London

But Punch's approval was not confined to applause. He invited Artemus Ward to contribute to his columns, and the invitation led to a series of delightful papers-"Artemus Ward in London"-which appeared in 1866. Some have found in them signs of flagging spirits-Artemus Ward died of consumption at Southampton on March 6, 1867-but the mixture of extravagance and "horse-sense" was never better shown than in the visit to the Tower:-

"You have no Tower in America?" said a man in the crowd, who had somehow detected my denomination.

"Alars! no," I anserd; "we boste of our enterprise and improovments, and yit we are devoid of a Tower. America, oh, my onhappy Country! Thou hast not got no Tower! It is a sweet Boon."

The gates was opened after awhile, and we all purchist tickets, and went into a waitin-room.

"My frens," said a pale-faced little man, in black close, "this is a sad day."

"Inasmuch as to how?" I said.

"I mean it is sad to think that so many peple have been killed within these gloomy walls. My frens, let us drop a tear!"

"No," I said, "you must excuse me. Others may drop one if they feel like it; but as for me I decline. The early managers of this institootion were a bad lot, and their crimes was trooly orful; but I can't sob for those who died four or five hundred years ago. If they was my own relations I couldn't. It's absurd to shed sobs over things which occurd durin' the reign of Henry the Three. Let us be cheerful," I continnerd. "Look at the festive Warders in their red flannil jackets. They are cheerful, and why should it not be thusly with us?"

A Warder now took us in charge, and showed us the "Trater's Gate," the armers and things. The Trater's Gate is wide enuff to admit about twenty traters abrest, I should jedge; but beyond this, I couldn't see that it was superior to gates in gen'ral.

Traters, I will here remark, are a onfortnit class of peple. If they wasn't, they wouldn't be traters. They conspire to bust up a country-they fail, and they're traters. They bust her, and they become statesmen and heroes....

THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM

Enthusiastic Pedestrian: "Am I on the right road for Stratford-Shakspere's town, you know, my man? You've often heard of Shakspere?"

Rustic: "Ees. Be you he?"

Mark Twain did not visit London until seven years later, and Punch greeted the "distinguished humorist" in the quatrain headed "Welcome to a Lecturer":-

"'Tis time we Twain did show ourselves." 'Twas said

By C?sar, when one Mark had lost his head:

By Mark whose head's quite bright, 'tis said again:

"Therefore, go with me, friends, to bless this Twain."

The greeting was renewed a couple of months later, and Punch's admiration, thus early expressed, never wavered in all the years that elapsed before Mark Twain was entertained by Punch at his table on the occasion of his last visit to England in 1907, when he came over to receive the degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Oxford.

W. S. Gilbert

The relations of W. S. Gilbert with Punch were made public property to a certain extent by Gilbert's statement, in the preface to the collected edition of the Bab Ballads, that the Cruise of the Nancy Bell had been "offered to the Editor and declined by him on the ground that it was too cannibalistic to suit the taste of his readers." The Bab Ballads (so called from the signature "Bab" which Gilbert appended to his illustrations) appeared in Fun, which was founded in 1861, and were, while they lasted, the chief attraction of that paper. Gilbert was undoubtedly nettled by Mark Lemon's decision; had it been otherwise, he might very probably have become a regular contributor to Punch. But it is not strictly correct to say, as the author of the notice of Gilbert in the Encyclop?dia Britannica does, that Gilbert continued to contribute to Fun because he had failed to gain the entrée into the pages of Punch. As a matter of fact he had frequently contributed, both with pen and pencil, to Punch in the early 'sixties. In 1865 his contributions included an amusing illustrated squib on the hydrophobia scare, the lines to "An Absent Husband," and a long prose piece "A wonderful Shilling's worth!" on the performances at the Polytechnic. The last named was Gilbert's final contribution to Punch.

The Nancy Bell was offered and rejected early in 1866, and appeared in Fun of March 3 without illustrations. The nonsense verses, "Sing for the Garish Eye," which appeared in Punch on April 16, 1873, were from Gilbert's pen, but the explanation given a fortnight later showed that they had been printed inadvertently; a "valued contributor" having forwarded them for Punch's private diversion and not for publication. They had actually been printed elsewhere ten years earlier. The amende was handsomely made, but Gilbert never contributed again to Punch. One cannot help regretting that he began the Bab Ballads with just the only one to which exception could have been taken, for it is cannibalistic!

Holding that a Free Press was an advantage to a nation, Punch had supported the Memorial to Leigh Hunt, who had been sent to prison "for publishing opinions which Mr. Punch in perfect safety may now put forth when he pleases, and the fact that Punch can just say what he likes without a fear of Newgate is owing in great measure to the battles Leigh Hunt fought," for which Punch was content to overlook Leigh Hunt's self-indulgent improvidence-so cruelly satirized by Dickens in Harold Skimpole. But when Charles Knight died in 1873 there was no need for reservation in the homage paid to that life-long and stalwart fighter for the repeal of the taxes on learning:-

Oft times the fuel well nigh failed his flame,

And Ruin stood between him and his aim,

But manfully he grappled the grim foe,

Nor ever yielded sword though oft struck low.

And his reward was that he lived to see

Cheap Letters broad-cast sown, and knowledge free!

* * *

[26] In 1858 Punch had chaffed Kingsley for his Ode to the North-East Wind in a parody purporting to be written by a dyspeptic valetudinarian, who resented the strenuous "muscular Christianity" of the original.

[27] See the Life of John Ruskin, by Sir E. T. Cook.

* * *

DRAMA, OPERA, MUSIC AND THE FINE ARTS

Before the middle 'fifties critics of the Stage in England-apart from the extreme Puritans-had three main grounds for complaint: the monopoly of the patent theatres, the patronage of foreigners by the Court and fashionable Society, and the popularity of degrading sensational plays; and up to 1857 the pages of Punch were eloquent on all three counts. In the period covered by this volume not only was royal patronage more judiciously and impartially bestowed, but the abolition of the exclusive privileges of the patent theatres had cut at the root of the evil and rendered possible such enlightened ventures as those of Phelps and Mrs. Warner at Sadler's Wells. The immediate result of the Free Trade policy in plays was to stimulate the legitimate drama, and in particular the cult of Shakespeare. Phelps's work in this connexion comes in for repeated approval, especially for his good all-round casts. Shakespearean actors are prominent throughout. The announcement of the death of Scribe in 1861 inspires the comment that the Members of the Dramatic Authors' Association are as well as can be expected. Punch had no love for endless réchauffés of French plays, but he was no bigot where foreign actors of merit were concerned, and cordially welcomed Fechter as Hamlet in 1861, while deprecating the preliminary puffing of his manager. It was not needed, for while admitting that Fechter's accent was disconcerting, Punch had nothing but praise for his admirable play of feature, his graceful ease of attitude and gesture and his intelligent conception of the character. As for the interpretation as a whole, foreigners were entitled to read Shakespeare for themselves: Punch held no brief for the Protection of British Stage Traditions, but believed in free trade in intellect as well as in cotton.

Fechter and Ristori

At the foot of the notice there is a picture of a stout, shabby tragedian exclaiming "Fechter! Pah! Hamlet with light hair and no points. Pah! The drama's gone." This professional jealousy is again ridiculed in "The Groan of a True Briton" a month later. The "boom" in Shakespeare this winter was quite remarkable, with A Midsummer Night's Dream at Sadler's Wells, Booth in The Merchant of Venice and King Richard II, Brooke at Drury Lane, and Fechter at the Princess's. Othello's occupation (on the stage) was extremely popular. We read in the issue of November 9, under the heading "Great Fall of Blacks":-

Five Othellos are stabbing themselves regularly, just now, and there will soon be a sixth, Mr. Charles Kean having ordered the largest pot of blacking Messrs. Day and Martin supply, and having announced that he is cubbing dext.

The vendetta against Charles Kean, it will thus be seen, was so implacable that Punch could not resist the temptation of dragging him in without any provocation.

Another and a greater foreigner dominated the scene in 1863. Of Adelaide Ristori, "the greatest of living actresses" in his opinion, Punch confessed that her genius beggared description. When she appeared at Her Majesty's in the summer of 1863 he declared that "in no English or American dictionary could be found words of sufficient strength" to express his admiration of Adelaide Ristori, or "his compassion for the unhappy person who does not go and behold one or two of her performances. This is a debilitated under-statement of the case.... What a magnificent voice hers is, and how artistically managed. The vox humana is the first musical instrument in the world, but then so few can perform upon it. Our Adelaide is one of the few." Here, at least, Punch's estimate never varied, and was only heightened by further familiarity. When Ristori played Lady Macbeth in English ten years later, Punch owned to some misgivings as to her accent,[28] but on the second performance he only noticed it twice. Otherwise "there was not, from first to last, one single fault to be found with this remarkable performance."

The Drama in Russia

Foreign actors and actresses were in the main treated handsomely and on their merits by Punch. Bandmann, the German-American actor, was highly commended in 1868 and advised to act Shakespeare. The visit of the audacious Schneider belongs to another phase of the drama, but the condemnation of French acting as a mere "swindle" put into the mouth of "Opie Wing," a "British Veteran-legitimate lead and blank verse heavies," is purely ironical. The methods of the Comédie Fran?aise troupe visiting London in 1871 are attacked precisely for the qualities which were their greatest distinction-their refusal to force the note or play to the gallery, their delicacy and self-effacement in the interests of ensemble, as when Delaunay came on in livery just to give a message. Punch's readiness to admit that fruitful suggestions for the improvement of the British Stage might come from the most unexpected foreign quarters receives a curious and even prophetic illustration in his remarks on "The Theatre for the People":-

Russia may well be described as a benighted country! But of all the queer notions ever bred of barbarism, commend us to one in the Pall Mall's latest "Notes from Russia." Conceive a Commission appointed to examine the question of the establishment of a "Theatre for the People"! And more; imagine the Commission reporting strongly that such a theatre should be constructed! A theatre with a moral object! A theatre meant "to divert the people from foolish, vulgar and gross amusements, by providing them with healthy and elevating spectacular entertainments at a cheap rate"! A theatre to contain seats for 2,350 people-say something between Drury Lane and the Lyceum-with 1,300 of the seats at prices varying from 2d. to 4d., and the others from 4d. to 3s. 2d.! This infatuated Committee further report that such a theatre might be made to bring in a profit of ￡5,000 a year-or ten per cent, on the capital employed. They recommend that the management should be entrusted to a competent private person, of experience, taste and refinement, and have prepared a repertory of 140 pieces in the Russian language, original and translated, calculated, they think, to forward their object of entertaining and elevating.

They further recommend that lotteries, masked balls, and the sale of spirituous liquors be forbidden in the "Theatre of the People."

Hear that, ye stunning sons of the music-halls-hear that, frequenters of our splendid saloons and brilliant bars! Contrast this barbaric dream of a Russian Blue Book, with the civilized reality of London, where Free Trade in theatres does its work, and the demand is allowed to create the supply of theatrical pabulum for the people, from the Victoria[29] to the penny gaff! The idea of the people being condemned to "healthy and elevating" entertainment; when their betters can revel in the Schneider, the Menken, the Cancan and the Opera Bouffe, the indecent burlesque, the breakdown, and the sensational drama!

"FRENCH WITHOUT A MASTER"

Matron in Stalls (reads from programme): "'Overture to L'Onfong Prod-eeg.' What does that mean? The prodigious child, eh?"

Accomplished Daughter (shocked): "Mamma, dear! No-'L'Enfant Prodigue'-it means the Infant Prodigy!!"

The historic invasion of the Russians did not occur till about forty years later. Of the famous French players who delighted English audiences between 1857 and 1874 the last and not the least fascinating was Aimée Desclée, who, after an arduous apprenticeship to her art and ten years of weary waiting, had been discovered by Alexandre Dumas fils, and leapt into fame in La Femme de Claude, Diane de Lys, Princesse Georges, and, above all, as the original Frou-Frou in the play of that name. Of her it was well said by a French critic that "she had a strange, wandering, unbalanced look that revealed the troubled depths of her soul. Her voice had a most peculiar timbre, and her abrupt utterances, every word of which stung like the strokes of a whip, fell upon a spellbound audience that hung on every word." After fulfilling a brilliant engagement at the Princess's Theatre in 1873 she returned to Paris to die at the age of thirty-seven. The tragedy of her brief success and the exacting temper of the Parisian public are well summed up in Punch's memorial tribute:-

But too late came the harvest of her pains;

The roots of Death had struck deep in her heart;

And what cares Death for glory or for gains,

Guerdon of that short life, so spent for Art?

And she was dying, with the pitiless cry

Of box and pit and gallery in her ear,

"Give us thy life, but act, and, after, die;

It is to live with thy life we are here."

While extending salutations to the foreigners Punch was not slow to acclaim native talent. In 1865 he recognized in Kate Terry "one of the most consummate actresses of her own range of parts we have ever seen on the English Stage." That was said of her appearance in Henry Dunbar in December, 1865, and in June, 1867, in Reade's Dora, "a real English Idyll, sweet, simple, natural and breathing of the country," he found her completely satisfying in a part unlike her usual stage self. Three months later Punch bade her farewell on her marriage and withdrawal from the stage, paying homage to her triple endowment of Genius, Goodness and Beauty, her "innocent sensitive face," and her gentle, gracious and womanly presence. Her "delicate influence" was a standing disproof of the arguments of those who despaired of true art and its reign on the stage, and she was retiring "from the top of the ladder reached fairly at last with her laurels still springing and none of them blighted."

The Coming of Irving

The rise of Irving from comedy and melodrama to Shakespearean drama is attentively and sympathetically followed. His performance in the "nightmare play" of The Bells is pronounced to be a triumph of merit; the sense of relief experienced on the fall of the curtain was in itself the highest praise. The programme at the Lyceum ended with Pickwick, with Irving as Jingle. Punch regarded it as an incongruity: he preferred to see Irving play The Bells without the Jingle. There was nothing wrong with Charles I but the play. "His make-up was admirable, his playing of the first and the last Act well-nigh faultless; but between these two Acts the actor was left to make the best bricks possible out of the scantiest wisps of straw.... I have no hesitation in saying that the last Act is as affecting a spectacle as anything I have ever seen on the stage." With Irving's Richelieu, in 1873, Punch was disappointed, though allowing him some pathetic moments. But Irving, it is suggested, may have been the victim of the bad traditions attaching to what was after all a pretentious and "wind-baggy" play. Irving's Hamlet was another matter altogether, and is treated very seriously and exhaustively by Punch. It was a "genuine and well-deserved success." No such strong and general sensation had been produced since Fechter, over whom Irving had the great advantage of speaking as a native the tongue in which Shakespeare wrote. No impersonation with which Punch was familiar, including that of Macready, displayed a more consistent conception, more sustained intention, more intelligent mastery of this many-sided character. This much granted, Punch severely criticized Irving's cavalier treatment of the text, his suppressions and omissions, his handling of all the scenes with the Ghost. The psychological interpretation of Hamlet's madness erred through over-emphasis on his pathetic and gentle side. The unsound strain was kept too much in the background, and consistency was attained at the expense of the text. Sundry scenic innovations are also condemned, and altogether high praise is tempered with a good deal of acute and legitimate criticism. On the vexed question of Hamlet's madness Punch writes intelligently, but without the wit which inspired the immortal couplet in Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:-

Hamlet is idiotically sane,

With lucid intervals of lunacy.

There are some good lines, however, in the issue of December 12, 1874, on "Hamlet's Right Hair," whether flaxen or raven. After all, as Punch argues, it is not a question of the thatch of Hamlet's upper storey:

... It is a brain

Fitting the part, that's asked to play the Dane.

Turning from serious drama to melodrama and comedy high and otherwise, we find a liberal acknowledgment of the excitement furnished by the Colleen Bawn, Boucicault's bedevilled version of Gerald Griffin's fine novel The Collegians, when it was produced towards the close of 1860. The plot is fully set forth, and "Jack Easel" confesses that he enjoyed the evening very much. "Whatever may be the opinion of the learned regarding Mr. Boucicault as a dramatist, there can be little doubt of his merits 'on the boards.' I can hardly imagine a better stage Irishman." But Punch, who had no mercy for Boucicault's resentment of criticism, in March, 1862, printed a mock notice signed "Dion Boucicault," threatening condign punishment on all who disparaged his genius or dared to leave the theatre before the curtain fell and D.B. appeared before the same. And a month later we read a mock trial of an unfortunate pittite who had ventured to make some unfavourable comments on the Cave scene. The production of the melodrama founded on Charles Reade's Never Too Late to Mend, in 1865, met with Punch's approval. Some of the audience hissed the prison scenes: yet Menken had been tolerated. This was the famous and notorious Adah Isaacs Menken, a native of

"The Menken"

Louisiana; dancer, actress, school teacher, journalist and poetess, married first of all to a Jew, whose faith she adopted, and then to the "Benicia Boy," Heenan, the prize-fighter. After a chequered career on and off the stage in America she appeared at Astley's in Mazeppa in 1864, when Punch made reference to her as "a bare-backed jade on bare-backed steed." It was certainly a succès de scandale, but "the Menken" made a stir in the literary world and found patrons and friends in Charles Reade, Charles Dickens (to whom her volume of poems, Infelicia, was dedicated), and Swinburne. In Paris, to which city she migrated, and where she died in 1869, she enjoyed the friendship of Dumas and Théophile Gautier. "The Menken" was not intended for a placid domestic life; she would not have been in her element at a Mothers' Meeting; but she was a highly educated woman, had studied Latin and Greek, had played Lady Macbeth, and, though not a Sappho, was a much better poetess than Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

AT THE FRENCH PLAY

Happy thought: Incognito secured-blushes concealed-and self-respect preserved (at least outwardly).

Another actress of the "hectic" type, about whom Punch as an informal censor morum was much exercised, was the famous Mlle. Schneider, who incarnated the canaillerie of Offenbach, and was the idol of Paris in the years in which the Second Empire was dancing to its doom. She appeared in La Grande Duchesse and La Belle Hélène in London in the season of 1868, drew the town at the St. James's Theatre, but met with little encouragement from the Press. Punch declares that Schneider was far more vulgar in London than in Paris, though on her native heath her performance was witnessed chiefly by ladies of the faster set; and draws the moral that they manage these things better in France. He found her "perhaps scarcely so extravagant in her vulgarity" in La Belle Hélène, but "there is all that excessive grimacing, continual adoption of the 'cad'-tone (which her admirers think so charmingly clever), that pointless introduction of rough horse-play, hitting and kicking, without which Schneider would not be Schneider." So Punch notes, as a "natural consequence" of the indulgence allowed by the Lord Chamberlain to Schneider to "kick up behind and before," like "Ole Joe," on every occasion, the production of the notorious and (for the time) audacious play of Formosa a year later. Formosa was a play of fast life, with scenes at Cookham (hence the name); a strange amalgam of impropriety and sentimentality; and Punch dealt faithfully with the ridiculous situation in which the heroine, discovered by her parents in the most compromising company, "makes a sudden and miraculous leap from the lowest vice to the height of most sublime virtue."

Comedy and Satire

Schneider and Formosa were, however, excrescences on the history of the British stage. A really characteristic Victorian product was the series of "drawing-room comedies" by T. W. Robertson, associated with the Prince of Wales's Theatre in the Tottenham Court Road, and the management of the Bancrofts. Punch thought Play faulty in construction and tricky in its effects, but had nothing but praise for the acting of Marie Wilton, Lydia Foote, Montague, Bancroft and John Hare. With him the Play was not the thing, but the players; still Robertson's later comedies, for all their artificiality, gave an immense amount of harmless pleasure to Victorian audiences. Elderly playgoers will always retain the pleasantest memories of School and Caste; they were a most amusing "sentimentalization" of a phase of society which has passed away, and fitted the company to perfection. The little playhouse in the Tottenham Court Road did excellent work in other ways, as Punch acknowledged in his dream dialogue with Sheridan, when The School for Scandal was revived in 1874 with Bancroft as Joseph Surface, Coghlan as Charles, Hare "a perfect picture" as Sir Peter, and Mrs. Bancroft admirable in "the rural coquette who had adopted all the graces and manners of a woman of fashion." Another notable Sheridan revival was that of The Rivals at the Haymarket in November, 1870, though Punch notes the disconcerting effect of Buckstone's personality: people roared with laughter at him before he spoke, or if he merely winked.

The satiric drama was dormant until 1873, when The Happy Land was produced at the Court Theatre by Miss Marie Litton on March 17. It was founded on Gilbert's Wicked World, "a fairy comedy," written for Buckstone and the Kendals, and produced at the Haymarket with only moderate success on January 4. The Happy Land was designed by Gilbert himself, but the stage version was mainly worked out by Gilbert Arthur à Beckett. Gilbert's name did not appear on the bill, on which the piece was assigned to F. L. Tomline (i.e., Gilbert) and à Beckett. The Happy Land was a satire on the Gladstonian administration, and three of the principal actors were made up to caricature Gladstone, Lowe and Ayrton-so closely that after a few days the Lord Chamberlain intervened and the make-up was considerably modified. Punch saw the piece before the Lord Chamberlain's order had been issued, and "crabbed" it heavily. Unlike most of those who saw the play, he found little wit in it. There were three or four "palpable hits" in the opening scene, but ten minutes of it were enough: the satire was of the sledge-hammer order, and the slain were hewn over and over again to weariness. "For a short time the First Act was lively; the Second was a faint shadow of the First." Punch's disparagement is rather odd, in view of à Beckett's connexion with the paper: it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the estrangement from Gilbert, referred to elsewhere, may have coloured his judgment.

The year 1873 was marked by the passing of Macready, who died on April 27. His services to Art, his high aims and neglect of fashion are recognized in the memorial verses, from which we borrow the last stanza:-

Hail and Farewell-thou last of a great line,

Who in ideal art moved as at home!

Because you bowed at a now empty shrine

Was your faith false? Lo, the believing come!

The sentiment is not easily to be reconciled with the generally hopeful view of the theatre expounded by Punch, or his comparison of Irving with Macready a few months later. In this personal context it is interesting to find that Punch's misgivings were at least partially removed by the emergence of a new star of the first magnitude. He had already welcomed Ellen Terry as Puck in the revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Queen's Theatre; he now paid an unreserved tribute to her performance in The Wandering Heir at the same theatre in March, 1874:-

Considering the present position of our Theatre, such qualities as spontaneity, grace, the finest truth of accent and emphasis, tenderness in grave passages, mirthfulness in gay ones, and all these fused in an atmosphere of buoyancy and brightness which exhilarates like champagne, and irradiates like light, are something to be indeed thankful for, when found combined in one Actress on an English Stage. They are to be seen combined at this moment in Miss Ellen Terry's impersonation of Philippa, in Mr. Charles Reade's drama of The Wandering Heir, at the Queen's Theatre. Let those who may doubt if such praise nowadays can have a solid foundation, go and admire for themselves. A new power of graceful comedy and womanly sentiment comes to us with the return to the boards of this young and charming Actress, whose eclipse for the last few years has been hard indeed upon a Stage that had no light to spare.

Stage Realism

In the earlier years of this period Punch was much concerned with the craze for sensation, and the stage-realism which leaves nothing to the imagination, but exalts the practical carpenter at the expense of the dramatic genius. This stock complaint reaches a climax at the close of 1865 in connexion with the announcement in a fashionable paper that in a play to be shortly produced in Paris there would be "a grand park with a real waterfall" and "a real river flowing through the stage." Punch's comments, if not very subtle, are at least a sane contribution to the everlasting conflict over stage illusion waged between "enterprise" and idealism.

Well, Syusan, 'ow did yer like Aroorer Floyd last night?"

"Oh! so lovely, Jeames-I cried so! that wicked Conyers!... Oh, Jeames, you won't desert me for our young missus, will you, dear?"

Over-reliance on scenery and machinery was, however, a venial offence compared with the exploits of management recorded in the following year:-

With exquisite good taste a highly enterprising Manager engaged "a few of the survivors" who were rescued from the wreck of the London, and has been paying them to appear every evening at his theatre, as a prelude to the gambols of Pantaloon and Clown. With a similar high notion of the duties of men catering to entertain the public, another enterprising Manager has hired "kind old Daddy," late of Lambeth Workhouse, to exhibit himself nightly in a new sensation drama, called The Casual Ward. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," when it is utilized in this way for dramatic exhibition; and flourishing indeed is the condition of the drama, when such magnets are deemed requisite to make a play attractive, and to draw a decent house.

If the horrors of the casual ward be thought a fitting subject for dramatic exhibition, perhaps we soon may see a drama called The Union Infirmary, with a score of real paupers all lying really ill. Or a sensation scene of surgery perhaps might prove attractive, and a real leg or arm be amputated nightly, before a crowded house.... Playgoers will thus become familiarized with horrors, which they read of with dismay; and to some minds a calamity may fail to cause regret on the ground of its affording a good subject for the stage.

Music-Halls

These particular anticipations have, fortunately, not all been fulfilled, though persons who have been tried (and acquitted) on a murder charge have appeared on the boards of recent years, and the deliberate cult of horrors has become the avowed aim of the disciples of the Grand Guignol school at the Little Theatre. The imaginary forecast in 1858 of the possibilities of playbills as a means of advertisement has long been transcended in fact. More interesting than these speculations is the prophecy which grew out of the complaint against long runs in the middle 'sixties. Punch predicts in the summer of 1864 that if the repertory system is kept up in the provinces Londoners will go to Brighton every night for their play or their opera. The actual fact is that the revival of repertory theatres in the provinces has rendered country cousins less dependent on their periodical visits to London in order to keep abreast with the latest dramatic developments. The mention of Brighton recalls a curious episode illustrative of the social code of mid-Victorian times. In the autumn of 1858 Punch rebukes the headmaster of a Brighton school who sent away the son of a distinguished actor lest it should damage his connexion! Today such a pupil is probably an asset rather than a handicap. The attitude of the Church to the Stage was hardly benevolent in the 'sixties: this may account for the satisfaction displayed by Punch over the "exceptionally sensible" sermon preached in 1873 at St. James's, Piccadilly, by Lightfoot, then Canon of St. Paul's, and afterwards Bishop of Durham. Dr. Lightfoot maintained that the stage, well conducted, would be an auxiliary of the pulpit; that it was an enormous and powerful instrument in the hands of Society for good or evil; and, while holding that the present state of the drama was far from satisfactory, he paid all honour to those dramatists and managers who were attempting to raise it by not pandering to the vitiated tastes of some of the public. In all of which sentiments he was vigorously applauded by Punch, who could not, however, resist the temptation of making verbal capital out of the preacher's name.

The competition of music-halls with theatres had already begun, and Punch had little or no conception of the length to which it was ultimately destined to be carried. He had no love of the music-hall as then organized, and nothing but contempt for the style of song which flourished in the temples of variety. So when the Bill, promoted in 1865 by Mr. Locke, M.P. for Southwark, for legalizing theatrical performances in music-halls was supported by a "dramatic authors' petition," he fell foul of the petitioners especially in regard to their initial contention:-

"The Lower Middle Class and Working Class have, of late years, developed a large appetite for intellectual amusement, which the number of theatres, and the present construction of theatres (which give no comfortable or proper accommodation for these classes) have failed to satisfy."

Perhaps we may admit that the theatre, as generally conducted nowadays, is not exactly the place in which to satisfy an "intellectual appetite." With our "intellectual appetite," still suffering under the mockery of a Barmecide entertainment, in the shape of a recent course of burlesques, we feel that the intellectual playgoer, like the sheep in Milton's Sonnet, "looks up and is not fed" in our London theatres. But is there not something besides "numbers" and "construction " of theatre to blame here? May not the quality of the theatrical fare provided have a leetle to do with it? And who are the purveyors of that fare but many of the gentlemen who sign this petition.

If they fail so miserably in satisfying the "intellectual appetite" of even "the Lower Middle and Working-Class" in our theatres, how are they to satisfy it better in the music-halls which they wish to open for the unlimited consumption of their viands?

If they have anything better to offer, why not try it in the theatres, where they will, at least, find the cooks-such as they are-in the shape of actors, and the best procurable garnish of scenery, dresses, and decorations, without the distractions of chops and steaks, sherry cobblers, cold withouts, and sodas-and-brandies?

... But the less the demand for the opening of the music-halls to theatrical representations is based on the demands of the "intellectual appetite" of the Lower Middle and Working Classes, the better.

Three years later Punch was unable to notice any great improvement in the variety stage:-

The music-hall gentry had a great gathering the other day, for a purpose which we should approve, if we did not hold that the music-hall, as at present conducted, is so pestilent a nuisance that charity can have nothing to say to it. One of the performers had grace or shame enough to deliver some doggerel in which he deprecated the wrath of Punch on the ground that everybody must live. It is the plea usually heard in the dock, and the answer is: "Yes, but decently." But as it is of no use telling the music-hall folks what gentlemen think of them, perhaps they would like to know what the respectable artisan thinks of them, and of the spirit in which it is not impossible that he may deal with them. Here are the words of the organ of hundreds of thousands of the skilled artisans and the Trades Unions, in fact, and we recommend them to special attention:-

"To these glaring temples of dissipation our youth are nightly attracted; where they are being gradually trained to drinking habits; where their minds are debased by the low songs and vulgar exhibitions provided for them; and where their morals are undermined and corrupted by contact with loose associates, when their blood is fired and their brains bemuddled with drink.... The expenditure incurred in those places of amusement keeps young men poor; causes marriage to be greatly postponed-to the increase of vice; or, if entered into, without the necessary provision for making a comfortable home; while the habits they acquire by going there will too frequently cause them to neglect home and family for their nightly amusements."

So says the Beehive speaking the sentiments of the Working Man. We do not think that he will see much force in the mewing plea of "must live."

The music-halls of to-day do not call for such censure; they have even become fashionable; but one is tempted to wonder whether there is any modern counterpart in Labour journalism to the austerely Puritan Beehive.

Opera in 1858

In the world of opera the domination of the Italian School of composers and singers, though intermittently and not unsuccessfully assailed, remained practically unbroken throughout this period, 1857-1874. Still, the formation of the company for the performance of English operas by Louisa Pyne and William Harrison in 1856 is a landmark that must not be overlooked. The partnership was dissolved in 1862, but the performances given at the Lyceum, Drury Lane, and Covent Garden theatres in those years anticipated the good work done in later years by the Carl Rosa and other companies. The general musical situation in 1858 is not badly summarized in the lines published at the end of June under the heading "Musicians and Maniacs":-

Three Traviatas in diff'rent quarters,

Three Rigoletti murd'ring their daughters!!

Three Trovatori beheading their brothers,

By the artful contrivance of three gipsy mothers!!!

Verdi in the Haymarket, Verdi at the Lane,

Green's in Covent Garden, and Verdi again!

Was ever a being so music be-ridden,

Barrel-organ-beground, German brass-band bestridden;

What with all the Concerts at all the Halls,

And the Oratorios-Samsons and Sauls-

Mozart and Mendelssohn, Haydn and Handel-

All lights of the Art in every part,

From the blaze of the Sun to a farthing-candle!

And the Classical Matinées,

With Clauss's touch satiny,

That to hear her your heart seems to go pit-a-pat in ye-

And Hallé so dignified, pure and sonorous,

And Henry Leslie's amateur chorus,

And fair Arabella, so melting and mellow,

That she charms the stern judgment of Autocrat Ella,

And Rubinstein-rapid and rattling of fist,

That one cries out with Hamlet's Papa, "Liszt, Oh Liszt."

Ella was the founder and director of the "Musical Union," which gave Chamber Music Concerts much on the lines of the famous "Pops"; Arabella was Arabella Goddard, the leading British pianist. Henry Leslie's choir for the performance of madrigal music carried off the prize against all comers at Paris in 1867. Wilhelmine Clauss was the Bohemian pianist, known in later years as Mme. Szarvady. To return to opera: it is amusing to find precisely the same charge hurled against Verdi as against Wagner twenty or thirty years later-that he cracked or wore out voices in their vain effort to contend against orchestral din. Grisi was still the chief diva, though a new star had arisen in Titiens, whose name spurred Punch to display his metrical prowess:-

We've got a great artist, a lady named Titiens,

Whose praises we'd sing, but her name will not rhyme.

Stuff! Horace reminds you, with "Tantalus sitiens,"

We've thirsted for music like hers a long time.

The Advent of Patti

The new Opera House had been opened at Covent Garden, and on the first night patrons complained of getting covered with white, as the paint was still fresh. The "Music of the Future" continues to excite Punch's derision, and at the close of 1858 he seizes the opportunity of running a tilt against Lohengrin:-

Meyerbeer's opera of the Africaine seems to be "The Opera of the Future," for there appears but little chance of its ever being played in our lifetime. How many years has it not been locked up in the great composer's portfolio, undergoing a species of African slavery, of which manager after manager has tried in vain to find the musical key. However, we are sorry to find Meyerbeer lending his great name to Messrs. Wagner, Liszt, and other crotchet-mongers of the Music of the Future, in support of their inharmonious fallacies, that have lately been aired in a grand pretentious production, called Lohengrin. A "grin" seems to be the end of all their Operas, though at best it is but a melancholy one, and anything but flattering to those who provoke it. The Viennese are all Lohengrinning like mad. We wish Meyerbeer would put this band of musical fanatics to shame by allowing his Africaine to become an "Opera of the Present," instead of "the Future," and so prove to these hare-brained gentlemen what good music really is. The best Music of the Future is that which has the elements of vitality in every note of it, so that there can be no doubt about its living several scores of years after its production. The specimen that we know of this class is Don Giovanni, and our would-be Mozarts cannot do better than take it as a model.

MODEST APPEAL

Lady (to big drum): "Pray, my good man, don't make that horrid noise. I can't hear myself speak!"

Punch's enthusiasm for Piccolomini had so far cooled that when a testimonial to her was suggested in 1860, he declined his support on the ground that she was "a pretty little personage, of good family, who, by force of bright eyes, intelligent acting, and a charming smile, pleased the public into a belief that she was a lyric artist." Moreover, if there was to be a testimonial, Grisi was the proper recipient. The following year was noteworthy for the advent of Patti, unheralded by any strident flourish of trumpets. Punch's first reference to her début in May was brief and ambiguous, and disfigured by a pun on her name. Six weeks later he remains still unshaken in his allegiance to his old heroines-Malibran, Jenny Lind, and Grisi-and suspends his judgment on the newcomer. Patti's arrival coincided with the "final farewell appearances" of Grisi, a mistress of the grand style as singer and actress, queen-like in her gestures and gait, unequalled even by Titiens (in Punch's opinion) in Norma and as Donna Anna; but Punch soon succumbed to the furore for Patti. As Zerlina she was "more charming than he expected," and a year later he celebrated his enslavement in jingling rhyme:-

O charming Adelina!

How sweet is thy Amina

How bewitching thy Zerlina!

How seldom has there been a

More tunable Norina!

And have I ever seen a

More enjoyable Rosina?

But to tell the praise I mean a-

-Las! there should have been a

Score more rhymes to Adelina.

Punch said what he could in 1861 of two forgotten operas-Balfe's Puritan's Daughter, with Santley in the cast, and Benedict's Lily of Killarney, a tertiary deposit from The Collegians-but found more congenial occupation in the spring of 1862 in levelling the shafts of ineffectual, because uninstructed, ridicule against Wagner:-

LE VERITABLE "OPERA COMIQUE"

We read that Herr Wagner is about to compose a comic opera, music and words. We agree with our facetious contemporary, The Musical World,[30] that we never heard an opera of Wagner's yet that was not more, or less, comic.... As this gentleman's music is said to belong to "The Future"-and certainly as a Present it is not worth having-we suppose he generally gets it executed by the celebrated Band of "Hope."

A KING WITH A STRANGE TASTE FOR MUSIC

Wagner and Gounod

Herr Wagner, the great composer, "for the future" (a.d. 1962), has received sharp orders from the King of Saxony to return home instantly. Is the King jealous that other parts of the Continent should have so much of the services of his Kapellmeister, and he comparatively so little? He probably wishes to have Wagner all to himself. Far from quarrelling with the desired monopoly, in the cause of music we heartily rejoice at it. The royal edict will have the effect of narrowing the evil of contaminating compositions. It is tantamount to a musical quarantine. Travellers must not venture too near, or else they may be infected with one of his malignant airs, which are not so catching, perhaps, as they are lowering, leaving a fearful sense of depression behind them. Henceforth, the flights of The Flying Dutchman will be restricted to one kingdom instead of half a dozen. We hope Wagner will be confined to Dresden all his life. Our Philharmonic will gain from his imprisonment. It will run no further risk of being nearly knocked on the head from another blow of his erratic baton.

The chief operatic attractions of 1863 are set forth in an excellent mock-Virgilian Eclogue in which the two rival impresarios, Gye and Mapleson, figure as Damoetas and Menalcas and Punch as Palaemon. Patti's popularity is attested in the couplet:-

My little Patti all the world must own

The nicest little party ever known.

SIC VOS NON VOBIS

Literature, Science, and Music at an evening party. Total defeat of the two former.

The list of celebrities includes Titiens, Carvalho, Trebelli, Mario, Tamberlik (a heroic tenor, famous for his "ut de poitrine"), Giuglini, Faure, Formes, Santley-all of them long dead, except the last, who had, in 1862, just cast in his lot with Italian opera. He took part in the first performance of Faust in England as Valentine, and with such success that Gounod wrote for him the additional number "Dio possente." Faust is a landmark in the annals of opera in England; because it was the first work which shook the allegiance of the fashionable world to the Italian school, and for fifty years at least enjoyed a popularity equal to that of the early Verdi, of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and, judged by the test of performances, greater than that of Mozart or Meyerbeer. Faust was certainly founded on Italian rather than German traditions, but there was much in it that was essentially French, and one turns with curiosity to read how it struck so orthodox and, in some ways, so insular a critic as Punch. He treated the opening performance perfunctorily, briefly observing that the opera seemed to suit everyone's taste, but made his amende a month later:-

Thank you, M. Gounod; thank you, Mr. Gye; thank you, Mr. Mapleson.[31] As produced by your exertions Faust is certainly Faust-rate. Mr. Punch makes his apology for not saying so before, but he is not like some clairvoyants who can criticize by foresight. Moreover, such cascades of praise have spouted on all sides that he feared a while to add to the laudatory deluge. Now, having seen and heard and reflected at his leisure, Punch is ready to allow that the shower of superlatives has not fallen undeserved, and he will own that M. Gounod has produced the sweetest, prettiest and pleasantest new opera that, since the first night of Les Huguenots, the world has seen brought forth. The only drawback Mr. Punch felt when he witnessed the performance was that M. Gounod had not set the Brocken Scene. With that addition, Faust might have eclipsed Der Freischütz, and even without this it is not far inferior.

"Homeric Catalogue of Singers"

Many of the greatest singers of the time appeared in these performances. Miolan-Carvalho (the original Marguerite), Faure (the first Mephistopheles), Giuglini, the incomparable Trebelli, and Santley. Patti assumed the r?le of the heroine in the following year with great success; but Punch did not fail to welcome Titiens as Leonora in Fidelio, an achievement which he describes as "noble music nobly rendered." It was in 1864 again that the efforts of English opera to raise its diminished head called forth Punch's satire. Foreign opera still held the field, and the only English feature of the venture was the conductor Mellon.

The "Homeric Catalogue of Singers," published on April 1, 1865, shows how formidable was the competition of the foreign singers, headed by Patti, Lucca, and the honey-tongued Miolan-Carvalho, with other prima donnas from Munich, Berlin, Milan, Moscow, and Lisbon, and, amongst men, Mario, Wachtel ("the far-famed shouter of high notes"), Ronconi (a great actor and humorist) Tagliafico, and half a dozen others whose names have fallen into the limbo of forgotten singers.

Meyerbeer's long-promised and posthumous L'Africaine arrived at last in the summer season of 1865, but before its performance on July 22, with Pauline Lucca in the part of Selika, the libretto of this "grand new old opera" is irreverently burlesqued by Punch with delightful pictures by Du Maurier. We can only find room for an excellent travesty of the Song of Inez:-

I go to execution,

'Tis righteous retribution,

And by this Constitution

All foreigners must die-

and the excellent and well-merited criticism of the execrable singing of the opera chorus (old style).

"JUST HINT A FAULT"

Little Tommy Bodkin takes his cousins to the gallery of the Opera.

Pretty Jemima: (who is always so considerate): "Tom, dear, don't you think you had better take off your hat, on account of the poor people behind?" you know?"

Nilsson and Grisi

Punch returns to L'Africaine a couple of months later, but in a vein of irresponsible ribaldry. Punch's notice, however, is valuable because it is a good (if partly unconscious) satire on the attitude of the frivolous opera-goer who goes (or shall we say went) to the opera to be amused and titillated, to see and be seen, to applaud the "stars" in their show songs, but for the rest deaf to the appeal of poetry and passion. Punch, at his worst, never sank to this level, witness his appreciation of Jenny Lind and Titiens and Ronconi; but the glamour of good looks and a fine voice seldom failed to touch his susceptible heart. His appreciation of Christine Nilsson on her appearance in 1867 is, with certain reserves, a good estimate of one who in her prime was an almost perfect Marguerite, or perhaps one should say Gretchen, and who might have stepped out of one of the canvases of Kaulbach:-

It is not usual, I know, to wear thick boots at the opera; but I regretted very much that, obeying my young wife, I had put on a thin pair, when I went the other night to hear the new young Swedish singer. I have seldom been more charmed than I was by her fresh voice, fair face, and her agreeable demeanour. She sings in a pure style, with intelligence and taste, and she can hold a long soft note with none of the affected trembling of the voice which of late has been so fashionable. Her tones are clear and full, high but never shrill; and she has no need of French polish to conceal those cracks and blemishes which Verdi makes in thin weak voices. She is very young at present, and must not be crudely criticized; but she seems by nature gifted for the operatic stage, and having ardour and ambition to shine lastingly upon it. Because she happens to be Swedish, people think of their old favourite, and make absurd comparisons between a finished artist in the climax of her fame and a clever débutante who is wishful to be famous. The parallel, though premature, may in one point be permitted, for these Swedes have both the gift of singing not to the ears only, but simply to the heart; and though Christine Nilsson may not be a second Jenny Lind, she is even now among the very first of prime donne.

In 1868 regret is expressed that Royalty bestowed more patronage on Offenbach than Handel-the Handel Festival coinciding with the production of La Grande Duchesse in 1868; on the other hand, Patti's marriage to the Marquis de Caux is thought worthy of a mention under the heading of "Essence of Parliament"! In 1869 Punch notes the knighthood conferred on Costa, whom he had once described as "the tamer of wild prima donnas," and pays homage to Grisi, who died at the close of the year:-

GIULIA GRISI

Nay, no elegies nor dirges!

Let thy name recall the surges,

Waves of song, whose magic play

Swept our very souls away:

And the memories of the days

When to name thee was to praise;

Visions of a queenly grace,

Glowings of a radiant face,

Art's High Priestess! at her shrine

Ne'er was truer guard than thine.

Were it Love, or were it Hate,

It was thine, and it was great.

Glorious Woman-like to thee

We have seen not, nor shall see.

Lost the Love, the Hate, the Mirth-

* * *

Light upon thee lie the earth!

Hervé's Chilpéric is hailed in 1870 as a welcome substitute for the tyranny of Schneider and Offenbach; as for Tannh?user, Punch was apparently very much of the same way of thinking as the members of the Jockey Club in Paris, who received it with whistles and cat-calls in 1861:-

GEE WOE, WAGNER

A Solo by Mr. Crusty, after hearing a Selection from the Opera of Tannh?user

"The music of the future," eh?

Well, some may think it pleasant!

But when such trash again they play,

I'll for the future hope I may

Not be among the present!

Mario's farewell benefit, on July 19, 1871, when he played Fernando in La Favorita for the last time in London, was a scene of "roaring and wreaths" described with mingled humour and emotion by Punch, who hailed the retiring idol as the Prince of Lyric Artists:-

Though lost to ear

To memory dear

I ne'er shall look upon his like again!

TO ARTISTS, COMEDIANS, AND OTHERS

Anyone who wishes to study the true dramatic expression of the Tragic Muse in the act of drinking the last bitter cup of despair to the very dregs, should watch a young mother teaching the elements of music to her first-born.

Popular Songs in 1858

Concert music between 1841 and 1857 began and ended, so far as Punch was concerned, with Jullien. To what we have written in the previous volume of Jullien's disasters and death, it may here be added that Punch bade him God-speed on the grand tour in 1858 which was to restore his fortunes, and when the end came was active in canvassing for funds to support his widow and family, who were left totally unprovided for. Also, that he repeated his tribute to Jullien's great services as an educator of the "shilling-paying public." The taste of the musical million was still a matter of concern to Punch. His detestation of street bands, Ethiopians, Germans, Tyrolese, and Italians-principally emissaries of Verdi, his pet aversion-amounted almost to an obsession. The names of the popular songs in 1858-"Jim Crow" and "Keemo Kimo" were certainly not romantic. At a concert held in St. James's Hall in June, 1858, a negro song was sung with the delectable refrain: "Flip up in de scidimadinc, jube up in de jubin jube." Punch found some solace, however, in the concerts at Sydenham, where morceaux of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Handel, served up by Costa, took the sickly taste of Traviata out of his mouth. Punch's own education was advancing, but he had not yet learnt to spell Liszt's name properly. The extravagances of Liszt worship, which certainly reached a pitch never surpassed in the annals of musical idolatry, are burlesqued in a series of paragraphs aimed at Wagner as well as his son-in-law to be. Writing of Liszt's "fearful engagement" in Dresden, in 1859, he facetiously asserts that "Not less than two pianos were killed under him, and upwards of two dozen music-stools severely wounded." The "encore nuisance" had already found in Punch a strenuous critic; and a tumultuous scene at the Surrey Hall, when Sims Reeves had withstood the demands of a rowdy section of the audience for half an hour, provoked an indignant fulmination against the brutal exigencies of concert goers. Sydenham was in the main a centre of musical culture, but there was a slight lapse from grace at the end of this year when the "Calliope" or "Steam Orchestra" was imported from America. It was in reality only a big barrel organ, which gave out more steam than harmony. But the Crystal Palace redeemed itself in the following year by the performance of the Elijah, at a Mendelssohn commemoration, by 3,000 performers before an audience numbering 18,000. Sims Reeves, Miss Dolby, and Madame Parepa were the soloists; and Punch could think of no better praise of the last-named singer than to say that she reminded him of his Clara. For there was a Clara in those days, too: Clara Novello, the friend of Charles Lamb, all unmusical though he was, who had won the praise of Schumann at the outset of her distinguished career as a very great and noble oratorio singer. Punch went to hear her last farewell at the Crystal Palace in the autumn of 1860; "went, heard, and for the thousandth time was conquered."

The year 1860 was also noteworthy for the visit of the French Orphéonistes, a body of choral singers directed by M. Delaporte. The visit afforded Punch great sport because of the special "Vocabulaire et Guide des Orphéonistes Fran?ais à Londres" which was specially issued for their benefit, and contained, amongst other delights, a full transliteration of the National Anthem beginning:-

"God sève aoueur grésheuss Couinn."

The "Pops"

Blondin's performances at the Crystal Palace, which were a great feature of 1861, suggested to Punch that the concerts might be popularized if the performers appeared on the tight rope. But this was "wrote sarcastic"; the morbid taste of the public for witnessing dangerous performances is repeatedly rebuked, and as a matter of fact Blondin was forbidden to trundle his child in a wheelbarrow along the tight rope.

MUSIC IN THE MIDLANDS

Intelligent Youth of Country Town: "Ah say, Bill, 'ull that be Elijah goin' oop i' that big box?"

Orchestral music was still a luxury, but London was waking up. August Manns, who succeeded Jullien at Drury Lane in 1859, had provided the public with "more music and less row than in the Jullienic era"; but his great work was done at the Crystal Palace. The "Pops," which came in the 'fifties and were cordially supported by Punch, have gone, and with them St. James's Hall, where for so many years the votaries of chamber music listened to Joachim and Patti, Hallé and Lady Hallé, Madame Schumann, and other great artists: and Exeter Hall, where the Sacred Harmonic Concerts were held, has undergone a startling metamorphosis. Oratorio has lost something of its hold on the British public. But the work done by the "Pops" can never be forgotten; and the multiplication of first-rate string quartets can be traced in great measure to their inspiring influence in the days when they were attended by George Eliot and Herbert Spencer, Browning and Leighton.

Another pioneer whose talents Punch was quick to recognize was John Parry, the first, and as some old critics think, the best of the series of single-handed musical entertainers. Parry began as a serious musician, but soon found that his true bent lay in humorous sketches of the trials and tribulations and futilities of amateurs. After seeing Dundreary for the nineteenth time, Punch was persuaded by a friend to see John Parry in Mrs. Roseleaf's Party at the Gallery of Illustration. He was rewarded by a truly exhilarating impersonation of Mrs. Roseleaf, her little pet daughter, a tender tenor with a chronic cold in his head, a fascinating ringleted "Gusheress," and a matter-of-fact musician-all done by one gentlemanly actor without change of dress. Parry's gifts as a pianist extorted the admiration of eminent artists, and we may pardon Punch for saying that "none but himself can be his Parrylel."

Sims Reeves

Sims Reeves had been energetically supported by Punch in his refusal of encores. But when he was "conspicuous by his absence, as everybody might have known," on the occasion of a charitable performance in 1864, Punch made bold to observe that "considering how often Mr. Reeves is indisposed, it is high time that a deputy should be permanently hired for him." On this particular occasion "the usual medical certificate was produced and read amid the laughter of the audience, who had clearly come prepared to hear the usual apology which is expected now whenever Mr. Sims Reeves is announced." These are hard words, but the excuse was so frequently made that concert-givers in the provinces were in the habit of posting over their bills the reassuring announcement: "Sims Reeves has arrived." Even then he could not always be reckoned on. The famous tenor had undoubtedly a very delicate throat, and objected strongly to sing if he was not feeling perfectly fit. But his inordinate vanity was also a contributory cause. Sir Charles Hallé used to tell a story how, on one occasion, when Sims Reeves was engaged to sing at Manchester, he failed to appear at rehearsal. Hallé went off at once to his hotel-for he had "arrived"-and was told that Mr. Reeves was too ill to sing; but persisting in his intention, he was admitted to the sick chamber and found that the illness was due to the fact that Sims Reeves's name had been printed in the bills in the same type as the other performers. Sir Charles Hallé accordingly sent for copies, and by a process of accurate measurement succeeded in demonstrating that this awful act of lèse-majesté had not been committed and that "Sims Reeves" was printed in larger capitals than any other name. Whereupon the patient made a wonderful recovery and fulfilled his engagement.

DRAWING-ROOM MINSTRELS

(What they have to put up with sometimes.)

Affable Duchess (to Amateur Tenor, who has just been warbling M. Gounod's last): "Charming! Charming! You must really get somebody to introduce you to me."

As the "Pops" fulfilled Punch's ideal of a model chamber music concert, so the Saturday concerts at the Crystal Palace, conducted by Manns, with "G" (Sir George Grove[32]) as programme writer, best satisfied his requirements in the domain of the symphony and orchestral music generally. Charles Keene's picture in 1866 of the two enthusiasts, one political and one musical, is a pleasing comment on the growth of musical taste. They both agree that Monday had been a glorious night, but the one was thinking of Gladstone in the House, the other of Joachim in the Kreutzer Sonata.

Punch had already saluted John Parry; he extended a similar welcome in 1867 to the German Reed entertainment at St. George's Hall:-

It is really quite a novelty to hear some comic singing done by English singers, without feeling a strong wish that one had been born deaf. "Tol de rol," and "Rumti-iddity," and such old English comic choruses, have long since had their day. Go to the St. George's Opera if you would know what comic English choruses should be. In the interests of good music, we thank Mr. German Reed for giving men a chance of hearing something better, in the way of comic singing, than "Champagne Charley," or "Costermonger Joe." We hope his charming little opera-house will tempt people from going to the vulgar, stupid music-halls, when they want to hear some singing which may make them laugh.

This, be it remarked, was at the time when the favourite popular songs were "Champagne Charley," "Not for Joseph," and "Paddle Your Own Canoe," and when, in consequence, Punch's complaints of the idiocy of music-hall songs were both frequent and free.

THE FINE ARTS

Depreciation and Discovery

Punch's virtual conversion to the principles of Pre-Raphaelitism has already been noted, and the alliance was confirmed by the enterprise of his publishers in connexion with Once a Week, to which Millais, Sandys, and Rossetti were regular contributors. So we are not surprised to find his criticisms of the Royal Academy growing in frankness and even hostility during the early years of the period now under review. In June, 1858, he complains of the monotony of the subjects chosen for treatment at the annual show-endless portraits of a lady or gentleman; Tom Jones and Sophia; Sancho Panza and the Duchess; Moses and the Spectacles; Sir Roger de Coverley; Bruce and the Spider. To the same year belongs his protest against the patronage of foreign sculptors à propos of the Wellington Memorial Competition. But the point of his criticism is rather blunted by his failure to acknowledge the merits of native genius, as represented by Alfred Stevens, that "rare artist, too little recognized and revered," as a modern writer has truthfully described him. Punch refers to his design, but misspells his name "Stephens," and evidently saw nothing uncommon in his work. Against this lapse may be set the evidence of a true flair two years later. Amid a wilderness of mediocrities Punch finds an oasis or two at the Academy Exhibition of 1860. The names of most of the exhibitors are forgotten, but there is one notable exception:-

One would have expected Mr. Whistler's talents to have been developed on the flute rather than At the Piano (598). Nevertheless the painting of that title shows genius. The tone which he has produced from his piano is admirable, and he has struck on it a chord of colour which will, I hope, find an echo in his future works.

THE GREAT EXHIBITION

Sarah Jane: "Lawks! Why, it's hexact like our Hemmer!"

In 1861 the practice of holding "single picture" shows, charging for the privilege of beholding one canvas the price of a whole exhibition, comes in for semi-serious rebuke at the hands of an income-tax payer. But there was another evil against which Punch inveighed with positive ferocity in the tirade provoked by the Academy Banquet of 1862. The Royal Academy was not merely "mean in its local habitation" (the present exhibition rooms were not built till 1866), it was mean all through:-

Mean in its spirit, its schools, in the quality of the Art it has most fostered and engendered, mean in the self-seeking spirit of its rules of exhibition; mean in its treatment of the greatest men who have belonged to it, and still more, of the painters outside its pale; mean in the cliques which divide its own ranks, and the jealousies which distract its councils.

But it reaches the climax of its meanness once a year-at its Annual Dinner-and at this year's dinner it has capped the climax of meanness reached by all the dinners of all the years since first the Academy dined together.

This Academy Dinner is like the banquet which the poor lunatic, whose story is told by Sir Walter Scott, used to be set down to every day in his cell at the asylum. He fancied his table spread with a magnificent dinner of three courses, and ate of this imaginary feast with great gusto; but "somehow" he used to whisper to his visitors, "everything tastes of porridge." So at the Academy dinner everything tastes of toads.

The R.A. Banquet

The writer proceeds to drive home this indictment of Sir Charles Eastlake's[33] fulsome flattery of noble patrons and the niggardly encouragement of real talent by the familiar device of a dream. At the dinner of his vision great foreign painters are welcomed, and the solidarity of the Arts confirmed by the invitation of illustrious musicians and men of letters. Then comes the awakening:-

The newspaper reports of the Academy dinner lay before me, with its small list of distinguished statesmen, its long bead-roll of Titled Nobodies who never bought a picture or gave a commission to a painter; its absence of every one of the distinguished artists by rare chance assembled in London; its ignoring of foreign letters, and its scanty recognition of the respect due to native literature; its utter passing by of the claims of the Sister Arts-Music and the Drama; the fulsome fulness of its laudations of all who can influence its fortunes by favour; its sycophancy of rank and title and outward influence, and that in the face of a series of cool contemptuous disclaimers of all knowledge or interest in Art by the men before whom in succession the Academic speaker knocked his forehead on the ground; and lastly, as if to sum up in one unmeaning act the stupid snobbishness that marks the whole of this Academic entertainment, the toast of "Literature and its prospects and influences on Art" relegated to the very end of the feast, when every other institution which it can enter into the heart of a respectful and awe-stricken Academician to bow down to has been honoured, and when the lordly guests whom the bad dinner has disagreed with, or the President's eloquence has bored, have left the spaces at the tables, lately filled by their august heads, vacant.

ART v. NATURE

Sitter: "Oh, I think this position will do; it's natural and easy."

Photographer: "Ah, that may do in ordinary life, ma'am; but in photography it's out of the question entirely!"

The Royal Academy has, in many respects, reformed itself out of all recognition as the institution which provoked and justified this explosion. It is only one of the many evidences which go to prove how much more than a merely comic journal Punch was that he should have contributed as damaging an attack as was ever penned against the principles and policy of the R.A. in the days when it laid itself most open to criticism.

There are not many events in the art world in the 'sixties dealt with in so serious a vein. When Frith's Railway Station was purchased in 1863 for ￡20,000 by a Mr. Flatou, Punch contented himself with calling the purchaser a "Flatou Magico." There are friendly and well-merited memorial notices of John Phillip, R.A., in 1867, and of Alexander Munro, the Scottish sculptor, in 1871, while in 1870 Punch supported the appeal for funds to put up a tombstone to George Cattermole, who died poor.

English etching was "up in the market" in 1871. Punch has high praise for Seymour Haden, higher still for Whistler, his "brother-in-law and etching master." The peculiar quality and historic interest of the etchings contained in the portfolio issued by Ellis, of King Street, Covent Garden, have seldom been better described than in this appreciation:-

Whistler has etched the tumble-down bank-side buildings of Thames, from Wapping and Limehouse and Rotherhithe to Lambeth and Chelsea, above-bridge-great gaunt warehouses, and rickety sheds, and balconies and gazebos hanging all askew, and rotting piles and green weeded quays and oozy steps and hards, where masts and yards score the sky over your head, and fleets of barges darken the mud and muddy water at your feet, and all is pitchy and tarry, and corny and coaly, and ancient and fishlike.

Such etchings of this queer long-shore reach and marine-store dealers, and ship-chandlers, bonded warehousemen, and boat-builders, ancient mariners, and corn-porters, wherry-men, and wharfingers, Thames-police, and mud-larks, are all the more precious because the beauties they perpetuate are dying out-what with embankments and improvements, increased value of river frontage, and natural decay of planking and piling. Whistler has immortalized Wapping, and given it the grace that is beyond the reach of anything but art. Let all lovers of good art and marvellous etching who want to know what Father Thames was like before he took to having his bed made, invest in Whistler's portfolio.

Academy Pictures in 1872

Punch was a great Londoner, and his enthusiasm for an artist who was able to perpetuate the romance and magic of the "ancient river" carries weight. He scores some palpable hits, again, in the "Academy Rhymes," published in 1872, which begin:-

Bad pictures hot!

Bad pictures cold!

Bad pictures such a lot!

So well sold!

This shaft is especially aimed at Sir Francis Grant, P.R.A., and Mr. James Sant, R.A. Millais's famous Hearts are Trumps is neatly hit off in the quatrain:-

Liz, Di, and Mary, cool and airy,

How does your garden grow?

Azaleas in clumps, and hearts for trumps,

And three pretty maids in a row.

A POSER

Enthusiastic Young Lady: "Oh, Mr. Robinson, does not it ever strike you in listening to sweet music, that the rudiment of potential infinite pain is subtly woven into the tissue of our keenest joy?"

Punch was in no doubt as to the merits of one of the famous pictures of the year:-

About "Harbours of Refuge," no year

But some M.P.'s a valuable talker;

But my "Harbour of Refuge" is here

And its C.E. is A.R.A. Walker!

But he was sadly to seek in his disparagement of Mason's beautiful Harvest Moon:-

Sweet, but scamped in every part,

Such half-work most students guide ill:

The free-masonry of Art

Asks more labour, e'en in Idyll.

AESTHETIC WITH A VENGEANCE

Tom: "I say, old man, now you've got that stunning house of yours, you ought to be looking out for a wife!"

Rodolphus: "Quite so. I was thinking of one of those Miss Gibsons, don't you know."

Tom: "Ah! Let me recommend the tall one, old man. She'll make the best wife in the world!"

Rodolphus: "Quite so. But the short one seems to harmonize better with the kind of furniture I go in for-buhl and marqueterie, don't you know."

Sir Edwin Landseer

Landseer had often been severely handled by Punch for his accommodating courtiership, but when he died in the autumn of 1873, the long set of memorial verses which appeared on October 11 overlook this infirmity and concentrate on Landseer's services as a teacher of sympathy between man and brute. He was the first of painters who "give dumb things a soul"-in the faithful collie in the lone shieling with his head on his master's coffin; in his St. Bernards and antlered monarchs of the glen. It may be objected that the soul which Landseer gave his animals was a human soul and a sentimental one at that, and that Bewick had forestalled him with a more accurate diagnosis; but the insistence on Landseer's services as a promoter of the entente cordiale between man and beast is well justified. Landseer at the moment of his passing was probably, as Punch contends, "our best-known name in Art." The writer of the verses traces the official recognition of artists abroad:-

Till even upon this, our little isle

That looms so large in light of various fames,

The fair Queen deigned at last, though late, to smile

And dubbed her Knights-a few but glorious names.

But surely this is to overlook the knighthoods of Van Dyck and Lely (both from the Netherlands), to say nothing of Sir Joshua.

The campaign directed against the extravagances of aestheticism by Du Maurier belongs in the main to a later decade, but even in the early 'seventies the vagaries of preciosity had already begun to furnish him with fruitful subjects for genial satire.

* * *

[29] The "Old Vic," now reclaimed very much on the lines of the Russian ideal.

[30] The Musical World was edited by J. W. Davison, the musical critic of The Times, a well-equipped musician, an unflinching champion of Mendelssohn and a bitter and persistent disparager of Wagner and Schumann.

[31] Faust was produced at Her Majesty's Theatre (Mapleson) on June 11 and at Covent Garden (Gye) on July 2.

[32] Grove was then-in 1872-the manager of the Crystal Palace, and late in that year Punch wrote of him, "The Crystal Palace has never been so well kept as under the sway of my friend Mr. George Grove, Nemorum pulcherrimus ordo-Grove's rule is most admirable."

[33] Another Charles Eastlake, the namesake and nephew of the P.R.A., for many years contributed art-criticism to Punch over the signature "Jack Easel," but was clearly free from the suspicion of family bias.

[34] Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life.

* * *

FASHION IN DRESS

In the period under review in this volume England was dominated by two monstrosities, the crinoline and the Claimant. Fortunately they were not concurrent or England might have succumbed beneath the double incubus. The former was pronounced "gone" in 1867, the same year in which the arrival and recognition of the so-called Sir Roger Tichborne as the rightful heir was announced in the columns of Punch. The historic trial soon loomed large on the horizon, though it did not open till 1871. Of this portent some notice will be found elsewhere. Of the crinoline it is no exaggeration to say that Punch waged war against it for ten solid years; his pages resolve themselves into a sort of Crinoliniad; and when the monster fell it was not by force of arms assisted by guile as in the parallel campaign against Troy, but by its own absurdity and through the weariness of its supporters. With Punch it was a positive obsession. The extravagances of the crinoline dominate his "social cuts" from 1857 onwards. In 1858 he tells us that "Fops' Alley" at the opera is to be rechristened "Petticoat Lane"; and that the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons is to be enlarged as a concession to the lateral expansion of women's skirts. The popular negro song "Hoop de Dooden Doo" is re-written to fit the prevailing fashion, and a classical lyric, "My Flora," is perverted to suit the same purpose. Even at this early stage, however, Punch seems to have recognized the futility of his crusade. As he puts it:

The more you scoff, the more you jeer,

The more the women persevere

In wearing this apparel queer.

Crinoline Absurdities

He applauds the railway companies for their alleged determination to charge for ladies' trunks by size, not weight, but adds: "It's no use trying to laugh or reason women out of it (crinoline). In all matters of dress and in that of crinoline especially, the mind female is impervious to ridicule and reason. The only argument to use with them is the argumentum ad pocketum."

"IN THE BAY OF BISCAY, O!"

The last sweet things in hats and walking sticks at Biarritz.

Punch, though pessimistic, was persevering, if inconsistent, and continued to rely largely on the weapon of ridicule, and he had no lack of material. Thus we read in December, 1858:-

Visitors to the Cattle Show, at least those who go in Crinoline, would do well before they start to read the following short paragraph, which we extract for their perusal from a country print:-

"The Show was attended by several of the fair sex, for whose admission special means of entrance were provided. Through a pardonable neglect on the part of the Committee, this was neglected to be done at first, and a highly amusing incident occurred through the omission. Within a very few minutes of the Show being opened, a distinguished party of ladies and gentlemen arrived, and on coming to the turnstile (which was then the only entrance) it was discovered that the ladies, who we need not say were dressed in all the amplitude of fashion, could not possibly squeeze through so limited a space. In this dilemma, as the turnstile could not possibly be widened to the width that was required, the only course was, obviously, to throw open the great gates, through which the ladies, not without a titter, sailed majestically Show-wards in the wake of the prize beasts."

Ridicule, again, inspires the caricature of crinolines in the park chairs, or the account of children in crinolines. In 1861 Punch describes a child of four at an evening party who was fully six times and a half as broad as she was long, and reads a homily on the danger of implanting such follies in the mind of susceptible youth, since the child is the mother of the woman as well as the father of the man. There is, too, a burlesque picture of a modern governess giving a geography lesson on a globe formed by her own inflated skirts. But often he struck a serious note, and his suggestion of a crinoline hospital was not so absurd in view of frequent accidents, such as the following:-

CRINOLINE AND ITS VICTIMS

Notwithstanding all that Punch has said upon the subject, the accidents from Crinolines are, it would seem, upon the increase. Half a score at least have occurred through fire since Christmas, and several others we could cite have taken place from other causes. One of the last we saw reported was occasioned by a dress being caught up by a cab-wheel while the wearer was crossing a street at the West End. Here the victim was so fortunate as to escape with merely a bad fracture of her leg; but in most cases the sufferers have lost their life by their absurdity in wearing the wide dresses which are now accounted fashionable.

Length Succeeds Breadth

So the campaign went on for years and years, though Punch was magnanimous enough to record in 1864 that the much-abused monster had been the means of saving a girl's life by acting as a parachute and breaking her fall. In 1865 the fashion was already on the wane, but very long dresses were in vogue, to the great annoyance of Punch:-

LADIES AND THEIR LONG TAILS

Crinoline at length is going out, thank goodness! but long, trailing dresses are coming in, thank badness! In matters of costume lovely woman rarely ceases to make herself a nuisance; and the length of her skirt now is almost as annoying as, a while ago, its width was. Robes à queue they call these draggling dresses; but it is not at Kew merely that people are tormented by them. Everywhere you walk, your footsteps are impeded by the ladies, who, in Pope's phrase, "drag their slow length along" the pathway just in front of you. "Will anybody tread upon the tail of my petticoat?" This seems to be the general invitation they now give. Sad enemies to progress they are, in their long dresses; and a Reform Bill should be passed to make them hold their tails up.

A REMARKABLE STUDY FROM NATURE

But the new nuisance was trifling compared with the old, and relief predominated in the "Rhymes to Decreasing Crinoline" published a few months earlier. It was not, however, until 1867 that crinolines practically disappeared in fashionable circles, and that long skirts were curtailed to reasonable dimensions.

Though chiefly preoccupied with skirts, Punch bestowed a good deal of attention on the vagaries of feminine headgear. In 1857 the huge round hats in vogue moved him to protest. They were discredited, in his view, when worn by elderly ladies, but he allowed them the negative merit of having displaced the "ugly." The "dear little Spanish hat, so charming and so much more sensible than a horrid bonnet" shown in the picture of a stout lady of uncertain age, justifies the reservation "on some people." But the hat was entering into a serious competition with the bonnet, and by 1860 the "pork-pie hat," so indelibly associated with Leech's portraits of mid-Victorian girls, was firmly established in favour and gradually ousting the spoon-shaped bonnet which disappeared in 1865. This growing popularity of the hat trimmed with feathers, as opposed to bonnets trimmed with ribbons, had the result of causing considerable distress in the ribbon trade in Coventry. Punch, though "no lover of extravagance," found himself accordingly driven to urge his lady readers to flock to their dressmakers and drapers and purchase as many hat-ribbons as possible. They could justify their action by singing in the slightly adapted words of the old song,

All round my hat I wear a new ribbon,

All round my hat a new ribbon every day,

And if anyone should ask of me the reason why I wear it,

"'Tis to help the poor of Coventry who are wanting work," I'll say.

The appeal was followed up a week later by an ingenious and graceful picture of the new Lady Godiva riding through Coventry in a costume composed entirely of ribbons.

Bonnets held their own but in dwindling dimensions, their minuteness being specially noticed in 1867. This is attributed by Punch to the fashion of the chignon, on which he bestows ironic praise in 1869 as needing very small and therefore cheap bonnets. In 1871 "Dolly Varden" hats, flower-trimmed and with one side bent down, named after the character in Barnaby Rudge, engage Punch's pencil; a year later Mr. Austin Dobson wrote in St. Paul's Magazine: "Blue eyes look doubly blue beneath a Dolly Varden."

STUPENDOUS TRIUMPH OF THE HAIRDRESSER'S ART!

The very last thing in chignons.

Chignons

Turning from headgear to hairdressing, we find Punch a vigilant critic of coiffure. In 1858 he attacks the vagaries of mode as shown in hairdressing à la Chinoise "pulled up by the roots," and the fashion of wearing coins. To judge from Leech's pictures he greatly preferred the simpler style of braids and hair nets. The great event of the mid-'sixties, however, was the advent of the chignon, which proved only second to the crinoline as an incentive to caricature and criticism. In the ironical verses addressed to a "Young Lady of Fashion," the chignon stands first in the list of the artificial enhancements of beauty resorted to half a century back:-

I love thee for thy chignon, for the boss of purchased hair,

Which thou hast on thine occiput the charming taste to wear.

Oh, what a grace that ornament unto thy poll doth lend,

Wound on what seems a curtain-rod with knobs at either end!

I love thee for the roses, purchased too, thy cheeks that deck,

The lilies likewise that adorn thy pearly-powdered neck,

And all that sweet "illusion" that, o'er thy features spread,

Improves the poor reality of Nature's white and red.

I love thee for the muslin and the gauze about thee bound,

Like endive that in salad doth a lobster's tail surround.

And oh! I love thee for the boots thine ankles that protect,

So proper to the manly style young ladies now affect.

The chignon was no new invention, but a revival of a fashion mentioned by the Lady's Magazine for 1783, and described twenty-five years later by Maria Edgeworth as a combination of hair natural and false "plastered together to a preposterous bulk and turned up in a sort of great bag or club." But the fashion attained its apogee in the middle and late 'sixties, and afforded endless opportunities to the pencils of Du Maurier and Sambourne. One of the most ludicrous of the many caricatures to which the habit gave rise is that in which Du Maurier represented a lady riding on a pony with its mane and tail fluffed out to harmonize with her stupendous chignon. Later developments of the chignon are ridiculed by Sambourne in 1871.

Madame Rachel

The second stanza of the poem quoted above furnishes not an unfair summary of the arts of facial adornment of which that amazing adventuress Madame Rachel was the most notorious and expensive high priestess. Her beginnings were obscure and even ignominious. Her maiden name was Russell, but it is not certain whether she was born near Ballinasloe in Ireland or in London. Her first husband was a chemist's assistant in Manchester, from whom she had probably learned something of the compounding of cosmetics; her second and third husbands were both Jews-James Moses who was lost in the Royal Charter, October 26, 1859, and Philip Leverson. She kept a fried-fish shop in Vere Street, Clare Market, for a while, then started as a hair restorer in Conduit Street, and from 1861 to 1868 was in business in New Bond Street under the name of Madame Rachel (probably borrowed from that of the famous tragedian) as an enameller and vendor of cosmetics. She professed, in the phrase eternally associated with her name, to make women "beautiful for ever," but it was a costly process. Under the heading, "The Trials of Beauty," Punch, who had referred to her cosmetics as early as the winter of 1858, writes in 1862:-

The wife of a Captain has been called upon to pay near upon ￡1,000 for having been enamelled by Madame Rachel. Ladies take warning. Be natural rather than artificial. Never appear in society with a mask on, no matter how beautiful the mask may be. From the above you should learn in time how much it may cost you for being double-faced.

"THE BURDENS OF FASHION"

What we must come to before long!

The warning, however, was unheeded, and Madame Rachel continued to flourish exceedingly for more than five years, living in an elegant house in Maddox Street and paying ￡400 in 1867 for a box at the opera. The first crash came in 1868, when she was tried for swindling Mrs. Borradaile, the widow of a colonel in the Madras Cavalry, out of ￡5,300 on the pretence of making her "beautiful for ever" and fitting her to be the wife of Viscount Ranelagh. In September of that year she was sentenced to five years' penal servitude, and she was burnt in effigy on Guy Fawkes' day. In the following March her house, furniture and effects came to the hammer, and Punch's description affords a good clue to the extent of her profits:-

The lady's business having been knocked down by the Judges, her effects are about to be knocked down by the auctioneer. The catalogue and sale bills are quite overpowering to the imagination. The drawing-rooms and principal apartments are said to "present splendour and magnificence difficult to describe." There are candelabra (brass and lacquer probably) formerly belonging to the Emperor Napoleon, and incense-burners once the property of the King of Delhi! "Dispersed through the house are numerous works of Art and articles of virtu, many of them presentations from Madame Rachel's distinguished patronesses."

Fashions in Coiffure

Punch headed his remarks "Madame Rachel's Last Appearance," but the heading was premature. Released on a ticket-of-leave in 1872 Madame Rachel boldly renewed her operations in Duke Street, Portland Place, in 1873, and continued them till 1878, when she was sentenced a second time to five years' penal servitude for swindling another client, and died in Woking Prison on October 12, 1880. The curious may turn for further details to the reminiscences of Serjeant Ballantine and Montagu Williams. Both Serjeant Ballantine and Montagu Williams appeared for the prosecution in the Borradaile case. There were two trials: in the first, held in August, the jury disagreed. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the heavy sentence passed by Mr. Commissioner Kerr was due more to Madame Rachel's demerits and her record than to the merits of the case. But she had not merely obtained money under false pretences: she was a forger and a blackmailer as well. Ballantine, who could not be accused of squeamishness, had known of her in earlier days and describes her as "one of the most filthy and dangerous moral pests that have existed in my time and within my observation."[34] Montagu Williams, who gives a full account of the trial, calls her a "wicked old woman," but contents himself with observing that the case "afforded a striking illustration of the vanity of some women, and of what tricks can be played upon them by the artful."[35] Madame Rachel does not appear in the D.N.B., though less remarkable impostors have found a niche in that comprehensive temple of native talent, and her fame was not confined to one hemisphere. One of the springs on the shores of Lake Rotorua in New Zealand was named "The Madame Rachel Bath" in virtue of its medicinal and rejuvenating qualities.

FASHIONS FOR THE COMING SEASON

From the "Journal des Coiffeurs."

(The ladies have already begun.)

In 1866 the rage for dyeing the hair auburn seems to have been at its height. "Mr. Frizzle," a coiffeur de dames, is represented in one of Du Maurier's pictures as saying to a customer, "Black hair is never admitted into really good society." Enlarging on this theme in another place in the same volume, Punch observes that the maxim "Never say Dye" is completely abandoned, and suggests daily changes of complexion to suit the dresses worn. In 1864 we read of small dogs being dyed to match their mistresses' colouring! By 1867 the pendulum seems to have swung in the opposite direction and brunettes are again in vogue. The picture (also by Du Maurier) of fashionable ladies with short hair can hardly be taken seriously; it is probably not more than an unconscious prophecy of the "bobbing" habit of recent years. In 1869 Punch was much exercised by learning, on the authority of an American paper, that "nearly all the brilliant complexions seen among the fashionable women of New York are the result of eating arsenic. Since the introduction of the blonde fashion, arsenic-eating has become almost a mania." Tirades against tight-lacing date back to 1859, but they culminated in the ponderous irony of the "Wanton Warning to Vanity" published ten years later:-

Indeed the Morning Post ought to be ashamed of itself. That journal, which we used to call our fashionable contemporary, publishes a paragraph, headed "Tight-Lacing," which reports the particulars of an inquest held at the College Arms, Crowndale Road, Camden Town, on the body of a young woman, aged only nineteen, and whereby, if they see it, our dear girls who take in such instructive journals as the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine will be terrified to no purpose by the information that-

"She was out three hours with a perambulator, in which was one child, and as she neared her destination she fell down insensible. She was taken to 10, Polygon, where upon examination by Dr. Smellie she was found quite dead. It was discovered that she was very tightly-laced, and Dr. Smellie stated that death was caused by effusion of blood on the brain, caused by fatty heart, accelerated by compression of the chest produced by tight-lacing. The jury returned a verdict in those terms."

This statement, so inconsistently published by our once, and, we hitherto supposed, our still fashionable contemporary, is calculated to have a most unfashionable effect, namely, that of deterring girls from following the revived fashion of lacing as tight as they can stand, and tighter than they are sometimes able to go. But a propensity, which seems a law of their nature, happily compels them, for the most part, to follow the fashion regardless of consequences. The typical and average woman can no more deviate from the dress of the day than an animal can choose to change its skin or its spots. There is no fear that any girls accustomed to tight-lacing will ever be induced to relinquish that practice which renders them such delightful objects to one another, if ridiculous and repulsive to stupid men, by any such nonsense as a report of the verdict of a coroner's jury ascribing death to the effect of tight-lacing in accelerating fatty degeneration of the heart.

THE GRECIAN BEND

Does not tight-lacing and high heels give a charming grace and dignity to the female figure?

The Grecian Bend

High heels are not noticeable in Leech's pictures or before the middle 'sixties. The "manly style" of boots mentioned in the lines of the "Young Lady of Fashion" quoted above probably refer to the stout laced-up "Balmorals" which Frederick Locker refers to in his London Lyrics. The advent of tailor-made garments for women in the summer of 1864 is looked upon as a curiosity. Towards the end of the period under review a mode of carriage known as the "Grecian Bend," celebrated in a comic song of the time, is more than once noted and caricatured in Punch; faint echoes of the "Grecian Bend" still linger in the memories of the elderly; the "Roman Fall" is merely the shadow of a name. By the 'seventies the ?sthetic movement had already begun to exert an influence on dress, but it was confined to a small coterie, to the précieux and précieuses who worshipped old china and wore waistless dresses of sage green. On the general question of "the Influence of costume and fashion on High Art," which was discussed in a manifesto issued by "The Artists of the Nineteenth Century," Punch wrote sensibly enough:-

The declaration is signed by a great number of eminent men at home and abroad, and its point is to insist that people of the present day dress so hideously that they will not make pictures. A transitional change is recommended, and the Declarers affectionately remind the public that so long as they make Guys of themselves at the instigation of tailors and milliners, portraits have no value except as family memorials, whereas, if we dressed properly, the artists would make us into tableaux which the whole world should admire. All this is perfectly true, but what is to be done? How are we to extricate ourselves from the tyranny of the tailor and the milliner? This the Declarers do not tell us, nor was it to be expected perhaps that they should advise us how to conduct a rebellion. But why do they not tell us how they would like us to dress? Men, for instance. Are they to come out with a choice array of colour, and with a picturesquely cut garb, and that general ampleness and nobleness in treatment of costume, which bespeaks the grand and heroic in the wearer?

The Briton Abroad

At this point Punch deviates into absurdity. But the main argument is sound. As a transition, however, to the subject of men's dress, another deliverance serves our purpose even better. Punch loved to criticize and even carp at his countrymen and countrywomen, but he did not easily suffer any infringement of his prerogative. And so, when a correspondent of The Times fell foul of the dowdiness of Englishmen and Englishwomen abroad, he was up in arms at once:-

The Times abuses John Bull, and Madame son épouse, for going about on their travels got up as Guys-for shocking foreign prejudices, and showing their contempt for foreign opinion, by sporting eccentric shooting-coats, flaming flannel shirts, reckless wide-awakes-and worse still on the ladies' part, by the general shabbiness and ugliness of their travelling toilettes and headgear.

Now, making every allowance for the desperate necessities of newspaper writers in the dead season, and admitting that British travellers-male and female-include specimens both of the Guy and the Gorilla, Mr. Punch must put in his protest against any such wholesale indictment as this of his compatriots en voyage. On the contrary he is prepared to maintain, after surveying mankind from Calais to Calatafimi ... that, as a rule, the wearer of the best travelling suit (for stuff, cut, and condition together), the cleanest shirt, the least ragamuffin or ridiculous hat, the soundest and shapeliest foot-covering, is a Briton.

Englishmen turn neater and sweeter out of a railway carriage after a night's rattle, restlessness and frowst than any other people; they are more presentable, more like gentlemen, after an Alpine scramble among glacier and moraine, crevasse and couloir; they present better brushed hair, and cleaner hands and faces and whiter linen at the Table d'h?te under difficulties, and fall into less profound abysses of misery and degradation in sea-going steamers, than the natives of any other country.

I, Punch, am speaking now of the men. For the ladies-bless them!-I am compelled to admit they don't understand dress as an art so well as their French sisters. Millinery and dressmaking have their home and headquarters in France, just as cooking has; and for the same reason-because the inferiority of the raw material makes the elaborate and well-studied dressing of it a matter of sheer necessity.

But, apart from their national shortcoming in the art of dress, I maintain that Englishwomen, on their travels, deserve as much good said of them as Englishmen. Bless their fresh faces, and smooth hair, and clean cuffs and collars! In these particulars, what French or German woman can hold the candle to 'em?

I admit that the plain British female looks plain on her travels, and maybe dowdy ... But this I will maintain, that an attractive Englishwoman loses less of her attractiveness under the necessities and accidents of travel than any of her Continental rivals. She has a quality of purity and freshness about her which seems to repel all soil, whether material or moral, as the oil in the duck's tail-gland drives off the water-drops from his plumage; and, as a rule, her clothes, and her way of wearing them, have the same merits of freshness and purity in comparison with those of her rivals.

This, then, is the first proposition I am prepared to maintain against all comers: that English travellers, of both sexes, are, as a rule, the best-dressed travellers in the world.

My next proposition is like unto it, viz.: that the English abroad are the best-mannered travellers, and at home the best-mannered dealers with travellers, to be found in the circle of civilized nations.

A HINT FOR TAILORS

This is John Jones, who has kindly selected Mrs. de Cotillon's Thé Dansant, to display his idea of what the alterations in evening dress (said to be meditated by a certain R-y-l P-rs-n-ge) ought to be.

Masculine Dress

Throughout the period dealt with in the previous volume man, in Punch, was the predominant partner in the domain of dress. From 1857 onwards the balance is handsomely redressed in favour of the women. And as Punch was staffed by men, we may fairly attribute this change to the standardizing of male attire which dates from the middle of the nineteenth century. The difference between the dress of men to-day and in 1860 is immensely less than that between the dress of women at the same two dates. Beaver hats were still worn in 1858; they are even now exhibited in the shop front of a well-known hatter's in St. James's Street; but the silk chimney pot had already come to stay. The evening dress suit was indistinguishable from that now worn. There was not much difference in the cut of morning coats. Only in the "nether integuments" is the flux of fashion really marked. "Peg-top" trousers were in vogue in 1858 and for a few years subsequently, and Punch attributes their shape to mimicry of the crinoline, though in one passage he professes to derive it from the contours of the Cochin China fowl. The "Peg-top," however, did not last. It was otherwise with the introduction of knickerbockers, so-called from the resemblance to the knee-breeches of the Dutchmen in Cruickshank's illustrations to Washington Irving's History of New York.

HARRY TAKES HIS COUSINS TO SEE THE HOUNDS MEET

Enter Mamma and Aunt Ellen.

Mamma (to old woman): "Pray, have you met two ladies and a gentleman?"

Old Woman: "Well, I met three people-but, la! there, I can't tell ladies from gentlemen nowadays-when I was a gal, etc., etc."

In a letter to The Times in May, 1859, Lord Elcho recommends "nickerbockers"-so he spells the word-as a substitute for trousers for volunteers. Charles Kingsley in the same year derived them from country-made-and badly made-puffed trunk-hose. But their utility and convenience for country wear and sport were soon established, though the dreadful abbreviation "Knickers" did not come into use for some twenty years. The shortening of ladies' dresses and the bagginess of men's knickerbockers afforded Punch some excuse for professing to be unable to distinguish the sexes at a distance, but the actual assumption of knickerbockers by women belonged to a later generation.

Lord Dundreary

It is rather in the fashion of wearing their hair than in their dress that the changes effected in the appearance of men in the last sixty years can be best studied. Beards came in after the Crimean War, but they were not universally popular. The Bishop of Rochester took up so strong a line on the subject in 1861 that Punch was moved to protest:-

Good Doctor Wigram (Rochestere),

At Parsons' beards is raving:

We sadly fear that we shall hear

The Bishop's head needs shaving.

AFTER DUNDREARY

First Swell: "A-a-wah! Waw! Waw! How did you like him?"

Second Ditto: "Waw-waw-waw. No fellaw evaw saw such a fellaw. Gwoss cawicature-waw!"

But whiskers were the great feature of the 'sixties. They had been "ambrosial" before, but now the thing became a monstrosity in its profuse luxuriance. For this was the age of "Piccadilly Weepers," and of Lord Dundreary, the eccentric stage peer created by Sothern in Our American Cousin. Sothern, be it remembered, was a hunting-man and a persona grata in fashionable circles; and allowing for the element of caricature in his impersonation, it was at least based on firsthand knowledge of the type satirized. There is an interesting notice of the first production at the Haymarket of Our American Cousin in which Lord Dundreary is described as "a double eye-glassed dandy, with dyed whiskers which he paws and throws over his shoulder," but the critic admits that in spite of all Mr. Sothern's "funny and fantastic caricaturing, there is a something true to nature in his almost every touch." The hold that Sothern's impersonation took upon public fancy is shown by the fact that for several years Punch adopted "Dundreary" as a synonym for a vacuous, solemn, well-bred and prodigiously whiskered dandy, and in the Preface to Vol. xlii. Lord Dundreary is introduced as interlocutor in the usual dialogue.

THE NEW AND DELIGHTFUL METHOD OF BRUSHING THE HAIR WITH MACHINERY

Tailors' pseudo-classical nomenclature was already a frequent theme with Punch. In the same year Punch quotes a tailor's advertisement of a "Negligé Milled Tweed suit, consisting of cape jacket, vest and trousers for ￡2 2s. 0d.," which arouses the envy of the post-war Englishman. Hair-brushing by machinery is noted as a novelty in the autumn of 1863; we trust that the customers contrived to keep their whiskers out of the way of the brush. For the rest, we may briefly note the advent of the "Ulster" in 1871, and the prevalence of the single eye-glass in 1873.

* * *

[28] The present writer saw and heard Ristori in the sleep-walking scene at Manchester in the early 'eighties, and her foreign accent was undoubtedly most pronounced. Her first words provoked laughter from the gallery, drowned immediately in a storm of cheering, renewed at the end of an impersonation so powerful and even terrifying that one entirely forgot the accent. The episode had an amusing sequel. An old theatre-goer wrote to a Manchester paper to express indignation at Ristori's reception by the gallery. The laughers could not be Manchester men: they must have been boors from Chowbent. A couple of days later a letter appeared from an equally indignant resident at Chowbent repelling the aspersion on a community so civilized that it possessed a Town Hall!

* * *

SPORT AND PASTIME

A CHIP OF THE OLD BLOCK

Grandpapa: "Bless his heart-just like me! Spare the Nimrod-spoil the child, I say."

In the region of sport fox-hunting continues to dominate the scene. Leech's pictures are largely devoted to satirizing cockney sportsmen, but they render full justice to the enterprise and intrepidity of the younger generation and of hard-riding young ladies. He is less happy or at any rate less genial in ridiculing the irregularities of the "Mossoo" in the hunting field. The exploits and adventures of the ubiquitous Mr. Briggs form an agreeable pendant and supplement to the novels of Surtees. Mr. Briggs was not an aristocrat, but he was more of a gentleman if less of a personality than Jorrocks. But Leech's premature death left a tremendous gap, for both in humour and draughtsmanship the artists who took his place as delineators of the chase were immeasurably his inferiors. In connexion with the "noble animal" we may note that the advent of Rarey, the famous horse-tamer, was warmly welcomed by Punch and Leech in 1858. The possibilities of the treatment are developed in a variety of ways, but there is more than mere burlesque in the suggestion that it could be profitably applied to stablemen and horsebreakers. And here we may note a crude foreshadowing of winter-sports in Leech's picture of the frozen-out foxhunter who builds a "treboggin" and, with his groom seated behind, careers down hill and across country in a machine about 12 feet long and not 2 feet wide with a splash-board in front.

THE FROZEN-OUT FOX-HUNTER

Sporting Militaire recalls to mind his Canadian experiences (the ground being deep with snow), builds a treboggin, and for the moment ceases to swear at the frost, or to regret the six hunters he has eating their heads off in the stable.

In Praise of the Ring

Punch was in the main a supporter of "muscular Christianity" and had already noted, with more sympathy than hostility, the encouragement of boxing as an integral part of the education of the ingenuous youth. Disraeli's Parliamentary duel with Palmerston in 1858 is described in pugilistic terms, in which the victory is given to the former "on points." But, in view of his generally humane and humanitarian outlook, he had hardly prepared us for his remarkable eulogy of the Prize Ring in the year 1860. For it was in that year that the historic fight took place between the American Heenan (the "Benicia Boy") and Tom Sayers at Farnborough on April 17, and it was chronicled at full length in Punch. "The Fight of Sayerius and Heenanus: A Lay of Ancient London" in the style of Macaulay occupies a whole page. Its chief interest to modern readers resides in the fact that it is "supposed to be recounted to Great-grand-children, April 17, A.D. 1920, by an Ancient Gladiator." The narrative is put in the mouth of "Crawleius" well known "in the Domus Savilliana[36] among the sporting men," presumably a relative real or imaginary of Peter Crawley, a well-known prize fighter. But the speaker did a gross injustice to the next generation but one when he wrote:-

'Tis but some sixty years since

The times whereof I speak,

And yet the words I'm using

Will sound to you like Greek.

What know ye, race of milksops,

Untaught of the P.R.,

What stopping, lunging, countering,

Fibbing or rallying are?

What boots to use the lingo

When you have not the thing?

How paint to you the glories

Of Belcher, Cribb, or Spring,

To you, whose sire turns up his eyes

At mention of the Ring?

The train journey to Farnborough in the grey dawn, the company, and the fight itself are, however, described with spirit:-

Not only fighting covies,

But sporting swells besides-

Dukes, Lords, M.P.'s and Guardsmen,

With county beaks besides;

And tongues that sway our Senators

And hands the pen that wield

Were cheering on the Champions

Upon that morning's field.

We pass over the details of the fight-how Sayers was floored nine times, and had his right arm crippled; how Heenan had both eyes put in mourning-to come to the last stage:-

Two hours and more the fight had sped,

Near unto ten it drew,

But still opposed-one-armed to blind-

They stood, the dauntless two.

Ah me! that I have lived to hear

Such men as ruffians scorned,

Such deeds of valour brutal called,

Canted, preached down and mourned!

Ah, that these old eyes ne'er again

A gallant mill shall see!

No more behold the ropes and stakes,

With colours flying free!

But I forget the combat-

How shall I tell its close,

That left the Champion's belt in doubt

Between those well-matched foes?

Fain would I shroud the tale in night,-

The meddling Blues[37] that thrust in sight,-

The ring-keepers o'erthrown;-

The broken ring,-the cumbered fight,-

Heenanus' sudden, blinded flight,-

Sayerius pausing, as he might,

Just when ten minutes used aright

Had made the fight his own!

Bull Fight at Islington

This curious document, valuable as contemporary evidence, worthless as prophecy, serves to show how strangely Punch's humanitarianism was leavened and influenced by primitive instincts in the domain of sport.

Upper Class: "Winged him, my lord!"

Lower Class: "There's another, 'Arry!"

Pigeon-shooting and bull-fighting were another matter altogether. In 1870 an abortive attempt was made to introduce the latter at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, and the Islington-Spanish bull-fight is treated with a happy mixture of ridicule and contempt in a contribution to Punch's "Evenings from Home." The proceedings appear to have been tame enough, and the bulls were probably "doped," yet enough of the real thing remained to warrant the hostile reception which the entertainment received. At its close the "Islington Spaniards" dispersed to the Islington public-houses. Punch returned to the subject a month later. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had interfered to good purpose. The Islington bull-fighters had been summoned before a magistrate and fined, and their "entertainment" had been stopped. Punch seized the occasion to add a comment which, on the very day on which, in 1921, I write these lines, is as timely as it was more than fifty years ago:-

From Islington to Wormwood Scrubbs is not far, and it is much to be feared by the tame-pigeon-shooting nobility and gentry that the officers of an impartial Association, vigilant to protect poor animals from cruelty, will as soon as possible be down upon the Gun Club.

"TO MEMORY DEAR"

Enthusiastic Cricketer: "Ah, last season was a good one! I'd both eyes blacked in one match, and two fingers smashed in the return match the same week! But give me 1870 over again. I got the ball on my forehead at 'short leg,' and was senseless for three-quarters of an hour!"

Cricket and Football

Turning to cricket, we find that "over-hand bowling flung from the elbow" was mentioned by Punch as a novelty in the late 'fifties. Cricket was still played in tall hats at that time; but by the 'sixties caps had come in. The dangers of the game are a not infrequent subject of comment, and, before the days of billiard-table pitches, the ball was capable of a good deal of awkward bumping; but to judge from Punch's pictures the resultant contusions were regarded with equanimity by the players as part of the day's work or play. Cricket was extending its domain, and à propos of the establishment of clubs at Lisbon and Oporto Punch quotes an entertaining account of a game between these clubs by a Lisbon sporting journalist for the instruction of his countrymen. The incident is taken by Punch as an occasion for suggesting international games of cricket: Turks and Chinamen, Dutch and Japanese. The Dutch have long been votaries of cricket; and though it has not caught on with the Japanese and Chinese, both these races have of late years cultivated lawn tennis with considerable success. Here, then, as so often happens, a mock prophecy is fulfilled in a way in which the prophet never expected. A critical year in the annals of Lord's was reached in 1864 when there was a danger of the ground being sold for building purposes. A sum of ￡10,000 was needed to secure the interests of cricket, and Punch, in an imaginary dialogue between a countryman and a cockney, represents the former as ready to contribute 5s. to avoid a national disgrace and "zave Lard's cricket ground."

References to football are confined to comments, mostly humorous but occasionally serious, on the practice of shinning or hacking. The Rules of the "West Shynnington Football Club" are conveniently used as a vehicle for a number of bad puns, but the trials of the modern referee are foreshadowed in the suggestion that "a Police Magistrate should always be in attendance to dispose of all charges made by players." Punch in more serious mood discerns in the letter of "A Surgeon" to The Times the disastrous results of hacking as then permitted by the Rugby code. "Hacking," in Punch's view, was simply an unfair form of fighting and should be abolished.

The outstanding event in rowing circles during these years was the famous race between the Oxford and Harvard fours on August 27, 1869. Punch celebrated the victory of Oxford in a notice giving the names of those who took part in the contest, congratulating Oxford, and wishing health to both crews, the accompanying cartoon representing a gigantic brawny John Bull shaking hands with a muscular but comparatively slim Uncle Sam, both in rowing trim, with the legend "Well Rowed All!" Punch, as umpire, remarks: "Ha, dear boys, you've only to pull together to lick all the world!" The sentiment is better than the treatment. Unluckily the race led to some acrimonious comment in the New York papers on British sportsmanship, and Punch, in his rejoinder, was more vigorous than polite. River "aquatics" have not always been free from recrimination. The origin of the famous retort to bargees, "Who ate puppy pie under Marlow Bridge?" is obscure; but it is mentioned as far back as the Almanack for 1858.

PRACTISING FOR A MATCH

Leonora: "Dear! Dear! How the arrow sticks!"

Captain Blank (with a sigh of the deepest): "It does, indeed!"

Croquet and Flirtation

"Golf Sticks" are alluded to in January, 1858, but during the rest of this period I find no further mention of golf. Of social pastimes archery is still in favour, but croquet is by far the most frequently referred to. To judge from the pictures, croquet, then in its unscientific infancy, was played on lawns innocent of mowing machines or scythes. It was mainly an excuse for flirtation between Charles and Clara; and the cheating earlier mentioned was regarded as quite fair game. Punch dealt with it in a serial poem of heroic proportions in the year 1863. This epic-for it was little less-ran to seven numbers, but it is not memorable apart from its length. When the Croquet Tournament was held at Wimbledon in 1870, Punch was ready to acknowledge the presence of Queens of Beauty, but could not accord the men players a higher title than that of Carpet Knights.

CROQUET

Chorus of Offended Maidens: "Well! If Clara and Captain de Holster are going on in that ridiculous manner-we may as well leave off playing."

LAWN TENNIS

Miss Maud: "How do we stand?"

Captain Lovelace: "They are six to our love; and 'love' always means nothing, you know."

Miss Maud: "Always?"

Lawn Tennis

"Aunt Sally"-alleged to have been introduced by the Duke of Beaufort-is portrayed as a novel adjunct to the amenities of garden parties in 1860 by Leech. Roller-skating came in about 1873, and about the same time lawn tennis having survived its early name of "Sphairistikè," began to attract the attention of Punch's artists. The implements employed have a prehistoric appearance, but the pastime, thought still in its insular, garden-party and "pat-ball" stage, inspired some graceful lines in 1874:-

LAWN TENNIS

Now the long shadows of September come,

And idle for a time the scribbler's pen is,

He passes from the Town's discordant hum,

From garrulous gossip of the kettle-drum,[38]

From orators who should have been born dumb,

To watch upon green lawns the girls play tennis.

Robins are trilling in the faded trees,

The flitting swallows of their voyage chatter,

Testing their wings before they dare the seas,

For Nile's dun marge or blue-girt Cyclades;

The sportsman's shots come frequent on the breeze,

The flying balls keep up a pleasant clatter.

Croquet's a merry game for those who flirt

(Who doesn't, pray-Punch, poet, peer, or parson?),

But Tennis, when the ladies are alert,

Follow the swift ball with a looped-up skirt,

Strike it on high with graceful arm expert,

Burns up the masculine heart with sudden arson.

So, pour some icy fluid in a glass

Tinged with deep mulberry stain, true work of Venice:

And Mr. Punch will let the soft hours pass,

Watching with tranquil eyes each lovely lass

Flit like an Oread o'er the smooth green grass,

And win his old heart as she wins at Tennis.

* * *

[35] Leaves of a Life.

[36] Savile House, on the north side of Leicester Square, originally the residence of Sir George Savile, Burke's friend, was in its latter days rebuilt as a place of entertainment and became a resort of Bohemians and fast men about town. It was burned down in 1865 and the site is now occupied by the Empire Theatre.

[37] Policemen.

[38] "Drum"-a crowded social reception-dates back to the days of Pope. The Victorian "kettle-drum" was a tea-party.

A complete Index will be found in the Fourth Volume.

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