Donkey's dislike of a cultured clique—
("Fudge," by Goldsmith; but now called "cheek")—
Yet since or ever the world began,
Quarterly reckoning's good for man!
The Quarterly, not for the first time, overshot the mark by its "savage and tartarly" methods, and the incriminated critic survived an attack fortified by accurate learning but impaired by unrestrained animosity.
Punch Salutes Mr. Kipling
Punch resumed his genial strain in his tribute to Richard Jefferies, when that admirable prose poet of rural England and the pageantry of the seasons died prematurely in 1887. Matthew Arnold was not exactly one of Punch's literary heroes. His urbanity was admitted, but Punch slightly resented his intellectual superciliousness. Yet the verses on his death in 1888, cast in the "Thyrsis" stanza, acknowledge the value of his crusade against Philistinism, and the beauty of his elegiac poetry; he was "the great son of a good father." Towards Matthew Arnold's distinguished niece, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Punch was less benevolent on the occasion of the appearance of Robert Elsmere in the same year. The sorely tried hero is described as "wandering about, a married Hamlet in clerical attire, undecided as to his mission to set everything right and dying a victim to the Mephistophelean-Betsy-Prig spirit." Nor was Punch altogether appreciative of R. L. Stevenson, though he pays a reluctant homage to his genius in one of the "Mems for the New Year" for a literary man in January, 1889: "Resolutely to avoid making the most distant reference to 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.'" The standard of precision in the editing of Punch at this time was not above reproach. In the same year "Mr. J. L. Stevenson's Master of Ballantine" is reviewed though there was no such author and no such book. Punch made amends, however, in 1890 in his salutations of two notable newcomers. In February he was delighted by "the homely simplicity," the keen observation, shrewd wit and gentle pathos of Barrie in A Window in Thrums. Six weeks later he recognized in Rudyard Kipling's Plain Tales from the Hills a "new and piquant flavour," as of an Anglo-Indian Bret Harte. Punch found an "excessive abundance of phrases and local allusions which will be dark sayings to the uninitiated." But here adverse criticism ends. For the rest he acknowledges in the new writer a surprising knowledge of life, civil, military and native, and a happy command of pathos and humour. This tribute was followed up a few weeks later by a much more characteristic act of homage in doggerel verse:—
TO THE NEW SCRIBE AND POET
Air:—"O Ruddier than the Cherry."
O Rudyard, in this sherry,