[21] The income tax. Punch knew better, and prophesied from the very outset that it would never come off.
[22] "As well hope to touch, Memnon-like, the statue of Queen Anne into mourning music, as to awaken generous impulses in the House of Hanover towards art, or science or letters." The payment of 13s. 4d. each to actors at a Royal Command performance provokes a sarcastic reference to the Court Almoner Extraordinary.
THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS
As a mirror of public opinion on the status and importance of the learned and liberal professions Punch, when due allowance has been made for his limitations, his prejudices and even his passions, cannot be overlooked by the student of social history. A whole book has been written on his attitude towards the Church; in another section of this chronicle I have dealt at some length with his hostility to Pluralism, Sabbatarianism, Ritualism, and endeavoured to show how a generally tolerant and "hang theology" attitude was in the early 'fifties exchanged for one of fierce anti-Vaticanism. The "No Popery" drum was banged with great fury, and when the Roman Catholic hierarchy was re-established in England in 1850, Punch supported the Ecclesiastical Titles Act which declared the assumption of titles connected with places in the realm illegal and imposed heavy penalties on the persons assuming them. This Act, passed in 1851, remained a dead letter until 1871, when it was repealed. As for the law and lawyers the record of Punch is more consistent and creditable, and, as we have seen, he was from the first an unflinching advocate of cheap justice and the removal of irregularities which pressed hardest on the poor, an unrelenting critic of barbarous and oppressive penalties. No one was too great or small to escape his legal pillory, or to secure recognition for reforming zeal or humane administration—from Lord Brougham and Lord St. Leonards down to unpaid magistrates. To what has been said elsewhere it may be added that the series of papers written by Gilbert à Beckett, under the heading of "The Comic Blackstone," are much better than their title, for they contain a good deal of shrewd satire and sound sense. Punch had good reason to be proud of his own legal representative, the humane and genial Gilbert à Beckett. He welcomed Talfourd's promotion to the Bench as an honour to letters, for Talfourd was not only the executor and first biographer of Lamb and the author of the highly successful, but now forgotten, tragedy of Ion, but his services to authors in connexion with copyright earned for him the dedication of Pickwick. On his death in 1854, Punch's elegy fittingly commemorated the character and career of one of whom, as an advocate, it was said that the wrong side seldom cared to hear him, and who, like Hood, in his last words, deplored the mutual estrangement of classes in English society.
The Bench and the Universities
On the other hand, judges who jested on the Bench, indulged in judicial clap-trap, or encouraged the public to regard the Courts of Justice as substitutes for theatrical entertainments, are severely handled. Judex jocosus odiosus; but the type is, apparently, impervious to satire. Another anticipation of latter-day criticism is to be found in the remark made in 1856: "There was once a Parliament—(we do not live in such times now!)—in which there were few or no lawyers." Even more red-hot in its up-to-dateness is Punch's sarcastic dismissal of the cult of "efficiency" sixty-five years ago:—
Mr. Punch's reverence for the business powers of so-called men of business is not abject. The "practical men," who smile compassionately at schemers and visionaries, are the men who perpetually make the most frightful smashes and blunders. No attorney, for instance, can keep, or comprehend accounts, and a stock-jobber, the supposed incarnation of shrewdness, is the most credulous gobemouche in London.
With University authorities, professors, dons, and academics generally, we look in vain for any sign of sympathy, save that Punch condemned the rule which then prevented Fellows from marrying. For the rest, he looked on the older Universities as the homes of mediæval obscurantism, stubbornly opposed to reforms long overdue. Of the two, Oxford fared the worse at his hands on account of the Tractarian movement, Pusey, and Newman. This antagonism was based on political and religious divergences, not on any hostility to learning or the classical curriculum, of which Punch was a supporter, to the extent of printing jeux d'esprit in Latin and Greek in his pages. All along he was a jealous guardian of the "illustrious order of the goose-quill," a sturdy champion of its claims to adequate pay and official recognition, a vigilant critic of the "homœopathic system of rewards" adopted by the Crown in the Civil List. References to this undying scandal are honourably frequent in the early volumes of Punch. It may suffice to quote the letter to Lord Palmerston in the summer of 1856:—