PUNCH VOL CVII

LONDON:

PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICE, 85, FLEET STREET,

AND SOLD BY ALL BOOKSELLERS,

1894.

LONDON:

BRADBURY, AGNEW, & CO. LD., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.

Scene—Mr. Punch's Sanctum at "the Season of the Year." Enter Sir Roger de Coverley and Dr. Syntax.

"You may not recognise me, Mr. Punch?" quoth the old Knight, with stately modesty.

"Not recognise Sir Roger de Coverley?" rejoined Mr. Punch, urbanely. "Why, even disguised as a Saracen's Head—ha! ha! ha!—I should know those well-loved lineaments."

"I perceive, indeed," said the Knight, with scarcely-veiled complacency, "that you have perused my friend Atticus-Addison's all-too flattering account of me and my several adventures."

"I know my Spectator by heart," replied Mr. Punch. "Nor," added he, turning to the quaint, black-vestured, bob-wigged figure at Sir Roger's elbow, "are Dr. Syntax's Tours unfamiliar to my memory. Like yourself, I can say—

"Marvellous man!" cried Dr. Syntax, lifting his eyebrows until they almost met the downward curve of his tilted wig.

"Toby," cried Mr. Punch, "call for clean pipes, a roll of the best Virginia, a dish of coffee, wax candles, and the Supplement (otherwise my Christmas Number). Tell them, Tobias, to follow with a bowl of steaming punch—my own particular merum nectar—and Sir Roger shall see what I have forgotten of his story, his tastes, and the duties of Amphitryon!"

In two minutes the Illustrious Trio were "making the centuries meet" under the benignly blending influences of Good Tobacco, Sound Tipple, and Cheery Talk.

"And how fares 'Our Village' (to quote Miss Mitford) in these revolutionary days?" queried Dr. Syntax.

Mr. Punch smiled, and promptly quoted:—

"Exactly so," cried the pursuer of the picturesque, profoundly flattered by Mr. Punch's prodigious memory.

"Aye, prithee, Mr. Punch," said the old Knight, seriously, "tell us what means all this new-fangled nonsense of Parish Meetings, Village Councils, Hodge pitchforked into power, and Squire and Parson out of it, and I know not what revolutionary rubbish and impious absurdity?"

"It means, my dear Knight," replied Mr. Punch pleasantly, "that power and responsibility, otherwise the Village Vote, are, like a new Iphigenia, to rouse the rustic Cymon into manhood and manners, till he of whom it was said that

shall learn to rule not only himself, but his own village. You remember your Dryden, Sir Roger?"

"Humph!" groaned the Knight, "too well, too well!

might do well enough in poetry, but may mean ruin in practice. My misguided and stubborn friend, Sir Andrew Freeport, should have lived to see this day, and acknowledge the prescience of the testy old Tory he was wont to deride."

"Tilly-vally, my dear Sir Roger," returned the host, cheerily; "trouble not thine honest soul with such gruesome forebodings. 'The old order changeth, yieldeth place to new.' But 'tis 'lest one good custom should corrupt the world.' Cymon, with a vote, will not capsize the Commonwealth, any more than the British workman hath done, despite the prognostications of Bob Lowe and other cocksure clever ones. I'll see that the 'Good Old Times' are not banished, save to give place to Better New Ones! The New Village, Dr. Syntax, may not be quite as picturesque—in the old artistically dilapidated, damp, dirty, disease-gendering sense—as the old one. As you yourself said—

No, nor are cleanliness, sanitation, education, fair wage, an independent spirit, and the capacity for self-government. These things, dear Doctor, make the Man, not the Picture, and Man-making is—or should be—the aim of modern statesmanship."

"Mr. Punch," said Sir Roger de Coverley earnestly, "my only wish is that Merry England, in going in for the New Politics may not lose the old humanities and humours and heartinesses."

"As described, Sir Roger, in your own words, of which your presence and the festive season, remind me:

'I have often thought that it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold, if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambols to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season, and to see the whole village merry in my great hall. I allow a double quantity of malt to my small beer, and set it a-running for twelve days to everyone that calls for it.'"

(The Spectator, No. 131, Tuesday, July 31, 1711.)

"Trust me, gentlemen," continued Mr. Punch, "all that was really good—like this—in the Good Old Times you know can be preserved in the Better New Times we hope for. There will be plenty of work for the Sir Rogers, the Dr. Syntaxes, for your humane Vicar, Doctor, and your Squire Hearty and