SUNDAY MUSIC AS CANT WOULD HAVE IT
Goldsmith Bowdlerized
Punch could not see harm in music on any day, and he printed a charming "petition" from the song-birds of Kensington to Sir Benjamin Hall, expressing their apprehension of an order forbidding them to sing on Sundays. But then, as now, there were moralists who saw not good but evil in everything. In the same year of 1856 the Government issued an edition of Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" for the use of schools, and the lines:—
The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
For talking age and whisp'ring lovers made—
were amended by the substitution of "youthful converse" for "whisp'ring lovers." Assuming the character and style of Dr. Johnson, Punch castigates this "pseudo-purifier of Goldsmith" in round terms. "Sir, he is a noisome fellow, Sir, he is a male prude and a hypocrite. Sir, he is a dunce."
Punch's hostility to Exeter Hall, which has undergone structural and other vicissitudes even more remarkable than those of the Crystal Palace, was originally based on what may be called its foreign policy, which he regarded as indistinguishable from the worst form of Jellybyism. This is how he described Exeter Hall in 1842:—
It is at the Hall that the fireside philanthropist, the good and easy man, for whom life has been one long lounge on a velvet sofa—it is there that he displays his practical benevolence, talking for hours on the glory of shipping white pastors to Africa to baptise the negro; or, if the climate will not have it so, to die there. And it is from the Hall that the good and pious, having voted a supply of religion to the black, depart for their own comfortable homes, having, to their exceeding content, indicated their Christianity by paying a pound, singing a hymn, and—taking care of themselves.