Shooting with an aim unerring folly as it flies.
Punch's loyalty to Thomas Hood was testified in a long and perfectly serious study, in three instalments, of Hood as a poet and satirist, which appeared in 1896. In 1899 he was moved to sing the praises of Marryat in the manner of Gilbert's Captain Reece; in 1900 he reiterated his fealty to Walter Scott in verse as unimpeachable in sentiment as it was undistinguished in execution. I think one may safely say that nothing so inadequate to the occasion has since appeared in the pages of Punch. But even when the literary quality of Punch was at its lowest he was capable of welcome surprises, as for example in the really charming verses, in 1893, on Izaak Walton's Tercentenary—verses based on intimate and affectionate study of The Compleat Angler.
Another Tercentenary, that of Milton in 1908, prompted the cartoon in which Shakespeare congratulates his brother poet because every three hundred years they gave him a banquet at the Mansion House, while they only talked about a National Theatre for himself. A Chicago professor had seized the occasion to observe that Milton, if alive then, would be in favour of every advanced movement except Woman's Suffrage, and Punch turned the saying to good account in a mock-heroic sonnet after Wordsworth. One might well have thought that Charles Lamb's reputation was securely established by 1913, yet in that year a member of the London Education Committee suggested that the Essays of Elia was hardly the kind of book to be put in the hands of young women students. Punch dealt judicially with the offender in two letters—one from a prudish parent; the other from a humanist and lover of Lamb who sends a copy of the incriminated volume to his daughter, together with a report of the protest, and some comments on the survival of Podsnap:—
He lives, he lives though sorely spent;
We shrug our shoulders, and lament
The tyranny not overpast
Of Philistine and agelast.
SHACON AND BAKESPEARE