Young Person: "I have three School Board certificates, Ma'am!"
Mistress: "Oh, well—I suppose for honesty, cleanliness——"
Young Person: "No, Ma'am—for 'Literatoor,' Joggr'phy and Free'and Drawin'!"
Relations with American Authors
The founding of the Browning Society in the same year met with no more encouragement from Punch than Miss Braddon's boiled-down versions of Scott's novels. Punch dimly recognized Browning's greatness while resenting his obscurities and eccentricities, and in a further skit on the Society carefully disclaims any disrespect for Browning himself. This mitigated appreciation is developed in the memorial verses in 1889 which hail him as a gallant and manly singer and apostle of healthy optimism, while denying his Muse the quality of elegance. Punch was nearer the mark in his laconic reference to Tupper, who died in the same year:—
"His name has passed into a Proverb."
Martin F. Tupper, famed for his Proverbial Philosophy, has joined the majority. He was thoroughly in earnest, and said many a true thing in what popularly passed for poetry. He will be remembered as "The Great Maxim Gun" of the nineteenth century.
The Annual Register reminds us that in twenty-five years over 100,000 copies of Proverbial Philosophy were sold in England and nearly half a million in America.
Punch was happier in dealing with Longfellow than with Emerson; the description of the latter as "the cheery oracle, alert and quick," is hardly adequate. Punch, however, protested against the proposed monument to Longfellow in the Abbey. He had learned to appreciate J. R. Lowell, who, on leaving England in 1885 after his four years' tenure of office as American Minister, said that "he had come among them as a far-away cousin, and they were sending him away as something very like a brother." Punch refused to say good-bye to this great and wise American, and his "au revoir" verses contain pleasant allusions to The Biglow Papers and Study Windows. Nor was his welcome of Oliver Wendell Holmes a whit less cordial, when the beloved "Autocrat" visited England to receive a D.C.L. degree in 1886. Bret Harte had been welcomed by Punch in 1879 as a master of wit and wisdom, humour and pathos. Though, as was said of a famous composer, he began as a genius and ended as a talent, the influence of The Luck of Roaring Camp[10] on the development of the short story was fruitful and abiding. To complete the record of Punch's relations with American authors it may be noted that in 1881 he greeted Joel Chandler Harris, the author of Uncle Remus, as a benefactor; that he resented Mr. W. D. Howells's critical depreciations of Dickens and Thackeray; and that, when Walt Whitman died in 1892, he indited what was virtually a palinode:—
Whilst hearts are generous and woods are green,
He shall find hearers, who, in a slack time