Which, told to him, he tells to you—
How a great Lady deigned to wonder
At Charley's anti-Windsor thunder
"His father was so kind and mild—
I knew this gentleman a child:
I've stroked his hair. I sometimes say
I must have stroked it the wrong way."
The Albert Hall was opened on March 28, 1871, and the occasion is seized to administer a comprehensive rebuke to those who found it easy to laugh at the Queen, the Prince Consort, King Cole (Sir Henry Cole) and the Kensington "Boilers." That there were grounds for discontent, and that it was unwise to overlook the existence of industrial unrest, militant Radicalism and Republicanism Punch freely admits in the vigorous doggerel entitled, "Looking Facts in the Face," in which he plays the part of candid friend to Queen, Lords and Commons alike. After examining the just causes for discontent at home, the activities of Bradlaugh and Odger, and the ominous warnings furnished by the Commune and the spread of the new doctrines of Karl Marx and the Internationalists, Punch continues:—
So we, who don't hold that the world
To come right must be set topsy-turvy,