Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 107, October 20, 1894

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 107, October 20, 1894, by Various, Edited by F. C. (Francis Cowley) Burnand
E-text prepared by Malcolm Farmer, Ernest Schaal, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

The Assistant-Reader has been at work, and makes the following report:—
A pretty little volume is Mr. Anthony C. Deane's Holiday Rhymes (Henry & Co). That its merits are high may be safely inferred from the fact that the largest instalment of its verses came from the columns of Mr. Punch . Mr. Deane handles his varied metres with great skill, his style is neat and pointed, his rhymes are above reproach, and his satire, especially when he deals with literary and academic matters, hits hard and straight. And, though the author is a Deane, he never sermonises. But why not sermons in verse? I commend the idea to Mr. Deane. He could carry it out excellently, and earn the thanks of countless congregations.
Messrs. Methuen are publishing a series of English Classics, edited by Mr. W. E. Henley. They have started with Tristram Shandy , and have persuaded a Mr. Charles Whibley to introduce Laurence Sterne to the reading public of the present day. Permit me, says Mr. Whibley, in effect, to present to your notice Laurence Sterne, plagiarist, sentimentalist, and dealer in the obscene, a right pleasant and comfortable introduction, setting us all at our ease, and predisposing us at once in favour of the humble candidate for fame, whom Mr. Whibley alternately kicks and patronises. 'Tis pity (I have caught Mr. Whibley's own trick) that Mr. Whibley had not the writing of Tristram Shandy . He, at any rate—so he seems to think—would never have outraged our sense of decency, or moved us to thrills of æsthetic disgust by such platitudes as My Uncle Toby's address to the fly. Rabelais, it appears (Mr. Whibley has got Rabelais on the brain, he is Pantagruelocephalous), Rabelais may steal a horse, but Sterne must not look over a hedge. One may have no wish to defend the indecencies of Sterne, but to condemn them by contrasting them with the efforts of Rabelais is a highly modernised form of criticism, of which I should scarcely have supposed even a Whibley capable. On the whole, I cannot commend this introduction, with its jingling, tin-pot, sham-fantastic style. I feel inclined to cry out aloud with Master Peter , Plainness, good boy; do not you soar so high; this affectation is scurvy. And why is Mr. Whibley so hard upon the suburbs? His own manner of writing is excellently calculated to fascinate Clapham, and move Peckham Rye to an enthusiasm of admiration.