Muse over a pipe of the days that are dead,
Dream that once more I am able to scan
Closely the bird with the duplicate head,
Live once again with the Petrified Man.
It was another matter altogether when Punch heard that Clifford's Inn was to be pulled down in April of the same year. In his indignation he suggests that the Temple Gardens, Middle Temple Hall and Temple Church should forthwith be sacrificed to the craze for improvements, and continues in the same strain of exaggerated irony:—
If you turn the Charterhouse into a railway station, the Tower into warehouses and Westminster Hall into an Inebriates' Home, something will have been done towards making London a happier and a better place.
Another sign of the times which frequently exercised Punch's mind and stimulated his satire was the multiplication of huge new hotels. In 1902, when it was announced that St. James's Hall was about to be pulled down to make room for another of these monsters, Punch pictured Macaulay's New Zealander coming to visit London and finding it entirely composed of hotels and residential flats. The luxury à l'Américaine of these mammoth establishments excited Punch's strictures in 1907; simultaneously he inveighs against the poky and insanitary arrangements of the modern flat.
In earlier years Punch had been prodigal of suggestions for the "improvement" of London; in this period he is more critical than constructive, though I note that in 1904 he reverts to his old suggestion of a great open-air café. This, he now proposed, should occupy the ground floor of the Ritz, with a terrasse overlooking Piccadilly and the Green Park. But Punch did not scorn the cheap restaurants, and in one of his "Lays of a Londoner" pays homage to the charms of Soho—a tribute culminating in this admirable stanza:—
Borne on the cosmopolitan breezes