DR. DULCAMARA UP TO DATE; OR, WANTED A QUACK-QUELCHER.
["The jury, in giving their verdict, strongly censured the gross ignorance of the accused, and regretted that there was no law to prevent them from practising surgery.">[
Mr. Punch sings, sotto voce:—
Begone, Dulcamara,
I prythee begone from me!
Begone, Dulcamara,
Thou and I will never agree!
Agree? By all good powers, no! no more than oil and water!
For to the conscious humbug honest wrath should give no quarter;
And if Punch's ready bâton lays its thwacks on any backs
With special zest, it is on those of charlatans and quacks.
Quack! Quack! Quack! Oh the pestilential pack!
If there is a loathsome chorus, it is Quack! Quack! Quack!
But the Quacks are having high old times in these peculiar days,
And gulls mistake their horrid din, 'twould seem, for pleasant lays.
We are quacked into distraction by unchastened power of Jaw,
Assisted by Advertisement and unrestrained by Law.
Dulcamara up to date is no longer poor or petty,
The pompous, brainless charlatan pictured by Donizetti,
He outshines, out-talks, out-thumps, out-cheats, out-swaggers, and out-dresses,
With his nauseous, noxious nostrums, and his nasty, mucky messes.
Quack! Quack! Quack! He may quack the donkeys dead,
Their coin out of their purses and their eyes out of their head,
Their brains into sheer softening, their bodies to the grave,
But he flourishes unpunished. Is there nothing then to save
The noodles from his ignorance and knavery and bounce?
No law to lay him by the heels, no hangman's whip to trounce,
No pillory to gibbet the false fortune-piling pack
Who poison, maim, and madden with their Quack! Quack! Quack?
Dulcamara stands defiant, while his drum the live air fills
With praise of his appliances, his potions, and his pills.
With sham science for his shield, venal literature and art
For his touts and advertisers, he can bravely play his part.
The comic man will clown for him, if adequately paid,
And the poet and the painter puff his wares and push his trade.
He's proudly testimonialised; folly or purchased cunning
Crack up his nastiest nostrums, keep his worst deceptions running.
He will bleed you and blackmail you, if you're weak as well as wealthy,
Impoverish and drench you, aye, do aught—save leave you healthy.
For 'tis quack, quack, quack! and 'tis drum, drum, drum!
And Dulcamara—when not worse—is safe to prove a hum!
Quack! Quack! Quack! It is time that cry to quelch
By Law—or else to treat the quacks like sorry rogues who "welsh";
And if Dulcamara's really safe, until the Law they alter,
Why honest men must see to it, nor in their purpose falter
Till rascals of "gross ignorance," in foul gregarious pack,
Can no longer safely victimise with quack, quack, quack!
THE LION AT HOME.
The Hope and Pride of the Family (just home from the Grand Tour). "Oh, really, you know, the Men one meets in some of those places out West! I said to myself every night, 'Well, thank heaven I haven't Shot anybody!'"
Fond and Nervous Mother. "You mean, thank Heaven nobody Shot you, don't you, dear?"
A WORD TO THE WISE WHEELMAN.
The Speaker, at Warwick, said that "the bicyclists of the day are debilitating and degenerating the human race by the way in which they stoop over their work." The wheelmen would probably retort that, like Goldsmith's sprightly heroine, they "stoop to conquer." And we are not yet all wheelmen. Still, the Speaker has hit a blot in the contemporary Cyclomania. Few things are more unlovely than the "Bicyclist's Bend." Record-cutting would be purchased dearly at the cost of making men look like camels; and if success on the cinderpath or the road involved giving humanity at large "the hump," one would stigmatise the Cycle Race as the Inhuman Race. Let us hope the Speaker's sharp words will make our stooping cyclists "sit up"—in other than the slangy sense of the phrase.
Birds of Pray.
We're told a cormorant sits, and doth not tire,
For a whole month, perched upon Newark spire!
Vinny Bourne's jackdaw's beaten, it is clear.
Yet there are cormorants who, year after year,
Perch in the Church. But these omnivorous people
Favour the pulpit mostly, not the steeple.
Thrivers upon fat livings find, no doubt,
Cormorant within is cosier than without.
Cream of the Cream.—"London Society proper"—we are informed by Lady Charles Beresford—consists of no more than thirty or forty families! And how about London Society improper? Is that equally sparse and exclusive? And—terrible thought!—crucial question!—is it possible that the two orders overlap at all? That there are any "noble swells" who belong to both?
The Government's Public Policy in South Africa (according To Mr. Sydney Buxton).—Not "Carrington's Entire"!