At least he never lost his head!
Punch's acid remark made many years before, that we were incapable of producing a fine statue or memorial, is virtually repeated in his suggestion, made in 1896, for the formation of a "Metropolitan Statues Supply Association" for the purpose of supplying public statues and monuments on the hire system. There was certainly good excuse for the burlesque, for, as Punch reminds us, "Mr. Akers-Douglas, replying to Mr. Labouchere as to whether his attention had been called to a statue 'purporting to be of the late Mr. John Bright in the Central Lobby,' and whether it is to remain there, said that it was erected under arrangements made with his predecessors. He admitted that there were very varied views as to its artistic merits."
National Heroes and their Memorials
In 1902 the fall of the Campanile of St. Mark's at Venice prompts a Trafalgar Square Lion to remark: "I only wish some of our London monuments would come down as easily." In an earlier volume I have mentioned Punch's reiterated complaints of the time taken in completing the Nelson Memorial in Trafalgar Square. In 1903, after fifty years had elapsed, the monument to the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul's was still unfinished. Punch dealt faithfully with this discreditable delay in a caustic perversion of Tennyson's ode, "Bury the Great Duke," and a cartoon in which, under the heading "Ars (Britannica) Longa," Napoleon, hearing from his victor that his monument is approaching completion, sarcastically comments, "Déjà?"
On the question of burials in Westminster Abbey, it may here be added, Punch was clearly not satisfied with the arrangement which left the Dean as the chief arbiter, when he wrote in the summer of 1909:—
For whom shall England's high memorial fane
Offer a resting-place of hallowed stone
When they have nobly lived their destined span?
The nation speaks her choice, but speaks in vain;
The final verdict lies with one alone—