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whose enclosing movements people have learned to regard with a remarkably vigilant discovered by the Puritans of CROMWELL'S time, eye. After much discussion on the subject, the Leases Bill was thrown over altogether in whose doctrine on this point we follow ! the Commons; so, whatever TOMMY'S powers may be, they have not been increased by anything done in Parliament this year. To Mr. Punch's solemn warnings, given some weeks ago, this lucky escape is due. He merely mentions it-not for applause-being in the habit of saving the country only about once a-week, while the Tizer, according to its own statements and those of its correspondents, saves the nation at least four times a-week, besides keeping its eye on the beer-barrel. LORD PALMERSTON being asked, whether JOSEPH HUME was to have a statue, replied that he himself had made a speech in HUME's honour, which PAM evidently considered quite as distinguished a tribute.

Friday. The LORD CHANCELLOR said he would bring in the TOMMY WILSON bill the very first thing next year, and the law Lords were pathetic about the rights of Lords of Manors. This shows what was in the wind.

The Commons did what they could, and having got through their own business, had to sit waiting for Bills from the Lords. Mr. Punch, happening to look in about half-past eight, told them they need not stay any longer, as it was a hot night; but they could come on the next day, Saturday, and finish off as much of their work as possible, which they did.

THE WORKING MAN'S GUIDE TO THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

THE British Museum is
open on Mondays, Wed-
nesdays, and Fridays
gratuitously; however,
you will practically be
unable to avail yourself
of its advantages without
money. Its doors may
be open to you three
times a-week, but they
cannot admit you more
than twice in twelve
months. Except on
Easter Monday and Whit
Monday, you are hard at
work on every working
day throughout the year;
tinkering, tailoring, shoe-
making, hammering, saw-
ing, planing, chiselling,
centre-bit-driving, rasp-
ing, filing, bricklaying,
painting, plumbing-and-
glazing, and so on, as
the case may be. There-
fore, if you want to see
the British Museum you
must, as Iago tells Rode-
rigo, put money in your
purse. For, although you
may see it at Easter and

How much happier you are than the French! They have no kind Peers and Members of the House of Commons to restrain them from committing spiritual suicide by walking over the Louvre on a Sunday. On the contrary, their Government is so regardless of their true welfare, so indifferent to their highest interests, as to give them, by an act of despotic power, admittance to the Paris Industrial Exhibition on that holy day which your more benevolent and enlightened rulers, by constitutional means, endeavour to oblige you to devote to the serious contemplation of brick walls. How tender your superiors are for your souls! They really seem to love them more than their own. Witness the carriages to be seen on Sundays at the gate of the Zoological Gardens, and at the Star and Garter at Richmond. It is their determination that the working man shall never see the British Museum but on a working day. Of course that determination must be submitted to. Therefore, again, put money in your purse, in order that you may see the British Museum before you die on a working day, or you will never see it.

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A THAMES' DITTY.
COME where your nose will quiver,
Down by the dirty river.
Bring not alone some Eau de Cologne,
But all the scents you own.
Perfume of sweetest roses
We need for our outraged noses,
When its odour the Thames discloses-
Such smells were never known.

Come just above the Tower,
Sit there for half-an-hour;
Bring not alone your Eau de Cologne,
But all the scents you own.
Sniff when the tide is flowing,
Sniff when the wind is blowing,
Sniff where the sewers are going
To add to Thames' filth their own.
Come, &c. &c.

THE PROGRESS OF CANT.

APPEALS in favour of all sorts of charitable institutions with pious pretensions are flying Whitsuntide, you will about the country by post, and in most of them see only it. You will see may be noticed the following words:-"Owing it, and nothing but it; deuce a bit of anything it contains. You will be surrounded by a dense to the failure of MESSRS. STRAHAN, PAUL, AND crowd of people, who will make the place too hot to hold you in any comfort. Besides being Co., we suffer loss." squeezed and jostled, you will be stewed in a close reeking atmosphere. That atmosphere will contain a large quantity of carbonic acid gas and steam, which the multitude of men, women, and children that you are jammed in have breathed out of their lungs. The carbonic acid gas will stupify you, and render you incapable of attending to the objects of art and natural history by which you are surrounded, even if now and then you succeed in forcing your way through the crowd so as to catch a glimpse of them.

It is not the circumstance of the people around you being working people that will make the place close and unpleasant. When the aristocracy are crammed together the nuisance is just as bad; and perhaps the worse for patchouli, and other things of the civet kind. The skin does not exhale any products the less for being washed with ROWLAND's Kalydor, and if a dense mass of nobility were to keep breathing the same air, they would make themselves as mutually disagreeable, quite, as a body of the labouring classes similarly situated. This actually happens when they go to Court at St. James's Palace, where they are penned up together in a passage, and half stifle one another. Nobody can make any intellectual exertion when he is half-stifled. You, in that condition, will be unable to tell a lion from a leopard, or to distinguish the bones of an Ichthyosaurus from the skeleton of a Mammoth. What delight, or instruction either, will you derive from the Greek and Roman sculptures, and the Egyptian and Assyrian remains, you being in a state of semi-suffocation?

"Birds of a feather flock together;"

and we cannot help feeling that in many instances Cant has been attracted by Cant, for several prospectuses we have seen are as thoroughly crammed with the verbiage of piety as the mouths of the peccant bankers were stuffed with the sort of phraseology that is usually but improperly supposed to denote religion. We seriously recommend to all really charitable institutions to abandon as soon as possible the practice of filling their circulars with bits from the Bible; for the public have been so nauseated by the pious frauds and religious humbugs which have recently been brought to light, that nineteen persons out of twenty consign at once to the waste-paper basket all documents in which texts are sprinkled about with most obtrusive irreverence.

As aforesaid, then, put money in your purse. If you want to see the British Museum, make money. Put by your wages. Under the system of limited liability, perhaps you will be able to invest them so advantageously as to realise, in some years' time, an income sufficient for you Curious Phenomenon of Colours. to live upon without working. Then, it will be in your power to see the British Museum. You must not expect to see it before then. You might, to be sure, see it on Sundays, if you ACCORDING to the evidence adduced before had a different sort of superior classes to legislate for you. You might inspect the leopards the Adulteration Committee, it appears that and the lions, the Ichthyosauri and the Mammoths, the Elgin marbles, the Egyptian antiquities, pickles are coloured by copperas; the result MR. LAYARD'S bulls, and all the other wonderful works of art and nature contained in the being, that the more the pickles are done green, Museum, if the inspection of such objects on a Sunday were not a heinous sin, and if you were the more the purchasers thereof are done not blessed with pious and holy betters, who prevent you from committing that sin; a sin first brown.

A DISGRACEFUL ABETTOR OF INTEMPERANCE.

TUMBLE DOWN OF DOWNING
STREET.

E hear such has been the terrifying effect THIS locality has lately shown a disposition produced by the horto sympathise with the system, and it has been rors of the Thames' Water, as exhibited expected that official routine and Downing at the Polytechnic, It is not strange that where the wildest confu Street will go tumbling to the ground together. that several consion has prevailed the tenements in which it firmed Teetotallers have given up the exists should have gone crazy. We quite coincide in the opinion of the proper authorities, practice of waterthat it is useless to attempt to patch up Downing drinking, and since Street any longer, and that a thorough recontaken, as a sanitary struction is the only remedy for the evils comprecaution, to the imbibing only of wine plained of. It is true that the French alliance and ardent spirits. not even the plaster of Paris can any longer be has supplied a sort of cement for official use, but They defend them- available to keep the old system together. The selves by saying, that if they are to be such a dilapidated condition that the Secretary quarters assigned to the ministers have been in poisoned, they prefer for Foreign Affairs was obliged to have his the pleasanter poison dinner dressed out of doors, and in LORD of the two; and that, ABERDEEN's time the PREMIER is said to have sooner than be reduced to the necessity of swallow been indebted for the cooking of his goose to ing such impurities as have made the river their sewer-residence, they prefer the risk of all the have undergone a thorough taking down during some of his colleagues. The Government offices headaches in the world. Thus the cause of Tem- the last session, and it is fortunate that they perance runs the danger of being drowned in a have done so, as if they had been permitted to ditch, because there happens to be a scarcity of stand in their old tottery condition till they

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Psalmody in A Minor.

It is our belief that Old Father Thames himself fell, the effect would have been truly calamitous. will soon become disgusted with the abominable filth in which he is condemned to wallow, just as if it were a sitz-bath of mud prescribed for his health by some hydropathic doctor; and the chances are that the poor old gentleman will in time be compelled, in mere self-defence, to take to drinking. His urn, from which a limpid stream used once to flow, will be turned probably into a monster dram-bottle, or else you will see him lying stupified on one of his own banks with a barrel of XXX tucked under his arm, and the beer frothing freely from it. We should not be surprised to see a new spirituous compound advertised in his honour, under the name of "OLD FATHER THAMES," just as we have at present our "Old Tom," and which will be sold at all chemists, as the very best remedy for correcting the effects of the present abominable Thames' Water.

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MONSTERS WILL NEVER CEASE.

THERE is a class of people commonly called psalm-singers, not because they are accustomed to sing the compositions of the Hebrew Monarch in a decent manner, but by reason of being addicted to the droning of a melancholy sort of devotional doggrel through the nose. It is said that the relaxation of the Sunday Beer Bill has caused these psalm-singers to sing very small.

HOW "PUNCH," IS TREATED IN RUSSIA.

Now that the Sea Serpent has gone down-by the way, it is very JAMES CARR, an English workman, has written a brief but very doubtful whether it ever came up, an attempt is being made to intro-intelligent account of his sojourn in the interior of Russia. English duce a rival in the shape of a Sea Devil to the gobemouche part of the newspapers are circulated with blank columns; "and so expert are community. This very odd fish is described in terms that completely they," says our workman, "that they, (i. e., the Russians,) can comtake the wind out of the sails of everyone who would run it down as pletely erase the print on one side without injury to the other." The very like a whale;" and, indeed, the account is almost sufficient to writer supposes that this must be done with sand-paper, or something stop the voice of the caviller, by knocking all the breath-figuratively similar! Happy JOHN BRIGHT, he is so very clearly Russian that no of course-clean out of his body. The Sea Devil is said to have a mouth particle of sand is applied to him. It is otherwise with poor Punch; two-and-twenty feet in extent, which may be supposed to leave a very wide for, says our travelled English workman:opening for conjecture, on the part of those who are distinguished for their capacity to swallow anything or everything that is submitted to their notice by the medium of what are called "crammers." A mouth of such dimensions must form a very important feature, and, indeed, a solitary feature, for there can be little room for any other, as neither nose nor eyes can be said to "have it" in the neighbourhood of a mouth so extensive, that it can gulp down a human being entire without the slightest necessity for any division.

The report adds, that the Sea Devil can "swallow a man with ease," but we should very much doubt the "ease" of the operation, if the feelings of the victim are to be considered. If the Sea Devil really exists as described, we would give the creature credit, not only for swallowing a single individual at a mouthful, but we should not be surprised to hear, that he had gobbled up BARCLAY, PERKINS, MEUX, COMBE, DELAFIELD, and their respective Co's.-Entire. We congratulate the intelligent penny-a-liner, who has made a discovery which will replace the enormous cabbage, and other vegetable curiosities upon which the paragraph-mongers have lived so long that the cabbage and the pen may be said to have been equally worn to the stump'in the process of reiterated description. The Sea Devil is, for the moment, something new, and as the head is said to form a crescent, we may expect to find, as the subject of future paragraphs, an accurate account of the houses built on the crescent, and the people by whom they are inhabited.

NOTICE OF MOTION.-Early next session, MR. SCHOLEFIELD to move for a Committee to inquire into the adulteration of materials that deteriorate Members of Parliament.

I have seen Punch so much disfigured, that the owner has not had as much reading left as the breadth of his hand for his money.

That the Russians can so cleverly deal with facts that they can erase "all one side of them" to their own advantage, has been again and again shown; and never more clearly than in the Muscovite version of the Hango Massacre. For Mr. Punch's own part, he cares little for the application of the process of erasure; for he has this best and sweetest consolation, that no matter how much Russian sandpaper may be bestowed upon him, no quantity soever of such scouring can ever make him-BRIGHT!

Red Coats in Court.

Inter arma silent leges. Not so, says LORD CAMPBELL. He likes to see red coats in a court of justice; "his nerves are strong enough to bear the sight of them, and he hopes he shall not discharge his duty with less comfort because of their presence." There is an old circuit toast, "the glorious uncertainty of the law." Now red coats in court will give a deeper significance to this toast; for contrasting with the black of the bar, they may further illustrate the uncertainty of rougeet-noir.

SCENES IN THE FESTIVE CIRCLE! SIGNOR INSOMNUS (the well

known Tumbler), gives notice that he has again joined the Festive Circle, in which he has so often figured, and is happy to state that, during the Crab and Lobster Season, THE PAMPERS, known all over the world as the Furious Nightmare.-N.B. For terms, inquire at all Supper-Houses.

he will as usual go through his daring Evolutions on the celebrated WILD STEED OF

THE HEAD AT THE BANQUET. SCENE.-The Ministerial Whitebait Dinner at Greenwich. The Company very merry: Mr. Punch rises through the Epergne, and bespeaks the guests.

HERE's crispness to your Whitebait and savour to your Punch!
You know me by my bright pate, small legs, and double hunch.
You're familiar with Macbeth's head, that foretells the Thane's bad end,
And the Egyptian death's-head-that grim good-natured friend,
To diners in their glory, at Thebes and Memphis old,
Which as memento mori, unpleasant truths out-told.

So Punch, your weekly Mentor the dreary session through,
From this jovial circle's centre has a few last words for you.
For jaunty PAM, and warlike PAN, for LANSDOWNE wise and old :
For you, my gallant youngsters, ARGYLE and GRANVILLE bold-
GREY, CLARENDON, and LEWIS-MOLESWORTH in place at last:
For you, men of the future-for you, men of the past.

For the last time the Lords' Order has to the wall been thrust,
To the wrath of my LORD REDESDALE and my LORD GREY's disgust.
From the pocket of JOHN BULL-that milch-cow that ne'er goes dry,
You have wrung, with dexterous squeeze, some more runnings of supply.
The last Bill has been rattled through at twenty knots an hour,
Knots-each of which ere Easter had cost weeks of talking power.
With their maximum of committees and their minimum of debate,
The concluding month of work crowns the previous five of prate.
Now M.P's about their business of pleasure have been sent;
Parler and mentir join no more to make up Parliament.
The time of words is at an end, the time of deeds begun:
There is a pause from making laws to getting work well done.
Let me warn you of last winter, of the fate of ABERDEEN;
Be blind like him, your lot will be what his sad lot has been.
Think that England has borne once what she will not bear again,
Her gallant soldiers perishing, in hunger, cold, and pain.

While ministers were resting or running to and fro,
To bath and moor and lecture-room-that host, like snow in snow,
Melted from off the hill-sides, and England stood agbast,
Helpless to meet the cry for help that came on every blast,
Yet willing, as she was, and is, and will be to the last.
That cry, this winter, will raise more than motions in the House :
The mountain may breed earthquakes, when you look but for a mouse.
Look to it, merry ministers, a distant thunder rolls,
Where bolts may not be conjured by points or protocols.
The devil is abroad-to work out the devil's plan;
Though in your eyes he wear the guise of a perfect gentleman.
He must be chain'd, and fetter'd fast within his northern den-
This is no play for lordlings, but it is work for men.

The right bands must be found for this, though horny hands they be-
The right words must be used for this, though they lack courtesie.
The country's heart is great, the country's eye is wide-
Obey you what that heart suggests, go where that eye doth guide.
The wind is sow'd-you deem'd it but a petty eddy's sweep:
Look out such gear as they must use who the whirlwind have to reap.
Rise to the pressure of your needs-the measure of your cause:
Be what those should be who assert great God's eternal laws.
If in those laws' assertion Europe turn to one vast pyre,
Let the flame rage:-the God that lights, doth he not guide the fire?

The Russian Orator.

THE Invalide Russe and the Journal de St. Pétersburg have gained a great accession of literary talent in the articles of a new contributor. That individual is the RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, late CHANCELLOR OF HER MAJESTY'S EXCHEQUER, whose speeches in Parliament in behalf of the Russian cause will be published in those journals, and will powerfully tend to animate the subjects of the CZAR against the Allies. We are not prepared to state, what the Right Hon. Gentleman will get by his contributions to the Russian papers; but we trust that the University of Oxford will give him the sack.

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Lirty Little Boys. "CHUCK US DOWN A COPPER OR A BIT O' CABINET PUDDING, MY NOBLE SWELLS."

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THE MINISTERIAL WHITEBAIT DINNER.-IN VINO VERITAS.

Pam (to L-rd Panm-re). "I SHAY, OLE FELLAH!-WHAT A JOLLY LOT OF HUMBUGS WE ARE!"

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