PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

Volume 104, APRIL 1, 1893.

edited by Sir Francis Burnand

THE BUBBLE SHOP; OR, "ONLY HIS PLAY."

How many deserving persons besides dramatic authors are looking about for good situations, and are unable to find them! Mr. 'Enry Hauthor Jones was sufficiently fortunate to obtain a good dramatic situation of tried strength, which, placed in the centre of novel and most improbable (not to say impossible) surroundings, has, in the hands of Mr. Charles Wyndham and his highly trained company of illusionists, achieved a remarkable success.

Within the last few years there have been notorious cases associated with the names of Members of Parliament, but as the House is a Legislative Assembly and not an inquisitorial tribunal instituted for the public investigation of private morality, no charge could be brought in the House itself against any one of its Members until after a Court of Law had pronounced its verdict, and, even then, a Member of Parliament, convicted of a criminal offence, would not cease ipso facto to belong to the House until after a motion for his expulsion had been carried. As Fritz in La Grande Duchesse expressed his wish to become a schoolmaster, in order that he might obtain some smattering of education, so an immoral M.P. (if any such there be) would be the very one to stand sponsor for a Bill for the Better Preservation of Public Morals, with a view to gaining that elementary knowledge of morality in which his education had been defective. But no one could have brought up some awkward case against him in the course of a debate in the House. In the parliamentary proceedings of Little Peddlington this might be done, but not in the House of Commons, which, by a very polite but necessary fiction, is supposed to be a House of Uncommons, far above the weaknesses of the ordinary human nature of mere Constituents.

Model Figures in the Criterion Toy-Shop.

Mr. Stoach (capitally played by Mr. J. Valentine—but everybody plays capitally in this piece) finds Lord Clivebrooke (Mr. Charles Wyndham—admirable also) between midnight and one in the morning alone with charming Jessie Keber (Miss Mary Moore,—delightful!) in old Matthew Keber's toy-shop, Keber himself (another very clever impersonation by Mr. W. H. Day) having gone out on the sly to get drunk on money supplied him by the aforesaid unscrupulous Stoach, M.P. So what would have to be said in the House should amount to this:—

Stoach. What! the Leader of the House bring in this Purity Bill!! Why I saw him myself with my own eyes in a toy-shop, all among the toys, alone at one in the morning with an attractive young person of the female persuasion.

"Look at that now," says an Irish M.P., following the example of Shaun the Post in The Colleen Bawn, when the scoundrelly lawyer brings a charge against the hero of the drama, "An' what might you be doin' about there at that same time?"

Supposing, for an instant, the impossible, Stoach would be called to order, and be severely reprimanded by the Speaker.

Had the much-heckled and long-suffering Clivebrooke been gifted by the Author with lively ready-wit, he would have replied to his father and supporters, who invade his room, in the pleasantest and Charliest-Wyndhamest manner, "Yes (lightly and airily). What could I be doing in a toy-shop with a young lady? Why (still more lightly and airily) of course I was 'toying with her!'" Whereupon his old father would have been immensely tickled, and the deputation, in fits of laughter, would have rushed back to the lobby to report "the last good thing said by that clever chap Clivebrooke! So like him!"

This Act would have ended with the triumph of ready-wit over disappointed malignity. Jessie Keber would have run in and embraced her hero, the Bill would have been carried (Cheers heard without), and all would have ended happily and pleasantly without any necessity having arisen for another Act, either of Parliament or of the piece.

"Yes," says this dramatist, "I admit the soft impeachment. I plead guilty, with extenuating circumstances. The play's the thing; and if the facts don't suit my play, so much the worse for the facts. Success has been achieved, and what more can any living author want? Credit and cash. Voilà tout! 'Credit' for my own original invention in hitting upon the Parliamentary accessories to my picture; and 'cash,' which will be paid as long as the public take an interest in the play, and just so long shall I take my interest out of the public money."

To sum up in the words of the old-fashioned tag, "If our friends in front are pleased, then Manager and Author are satisfied." But, if objection be still taken to the unreality of the Parliamentary setting of the picture, then "please remember," apologises 'Enry Hauthor, "that 'it's only my play.'"

A Liberator Lay.

Walking Round His Subject.—In Tay Pay's interesting review of The Life of Lord Aberdeen, a Book of the Week in the Sun, there is a delightful chord which shows that "the harp that once thro' Tara's halls" still upon occasion twangs. "It is pleasant," says Tay Pay, writing of Mr. Gladstone, "to be able to project ourselves backward to the time, when the statesman we know as full of years and the idol of millions, was the bashful, self-distrustful youth." Now, if next week our young friend, whose sympathy with bashful, self-distrustful youth, is instinctive, will manage to withdraw himself forward, he may be said to have thoroughly reconnoitered his subject, an excellent thing in a reviewer.

THE VILLAGE BEAUTY AND THE RIVAL SWAINS, F-WL-R AND G-SCH-N.

ASSISTED EDUCATION.

Christabel. "I say, Jack, how ever do you define the Equator?"

Jack (who has been to the Circus). "Isn't it a Menagerie Lion that goes round the World?"

     Jack has learnt about "the Imaginary Line," and got the answer a little