Our age has seen than his who held straight on,
Though the great God-gift from his days was gone,
"And Wisdom at one entrance quite shut out"—
Held on with genial stoutness, seeing more
Than men with sight undarkened, but with mind
Through prejudice and Party bias blind.
Another statesman of equal fearlessness and independence was W. E. Forster; but here the whole virtue of Punch's salutation in April, 1886, is summed up in the two lines:—
A sturdy lover of a sturdy land,
He served it, zeal at heart and life in hand.
I pass over the "In Memoriam" lines on the good Lord Shaftesbury in the previous year. They render full justice to his splendid and life-long service on behalf of the "helpless thralls of trade" and the "all unchildlike children" "victims of modern Molochs," "all who creep or fall on poverty's rough road or crime's steep slope"; but they are otherwise laboured and diffuse. Sincerity is no guarantee of literary excellence. Punch shows to greater advantage in the lines on Newman in August, 1890, who is lauded, not as a great Cardinal nor as one