This was written in hot indignation of generous youth (he was but twenty-two years old) at the French atrocity in Algiers, when, during the campaign, General Pelissier filled with straw the mouth of the caves of Dahra, wherein the opposing Arabs, with their women and children, had taken refuge, and set fire to the mass. This foul act of the future Duke of Malakoff caused a thrill of horror to pass through Europe, and the gentle author of "The Angel in the House" was moved by the scandal to the composition of his eight-stanza poem, of which Douglas Jerrold procured the insertion on the 16th of August (p. 73, Vol. IX.):—
"Rush the sparks in rapid fountains
Up abroad into the sky!
From the bases of the mountains
Leap the fork'd flames mountain-high!
The flames, like devils thirsting,
Lick the wind, where crackling spars
Wage hellish warfare, worsting
All the still, astonished stars!
Ply the furnace, fling the faggots!
Lo, the flames writhe, rush, and tear
And a thousand writhe like maggots
In among them—Vive la guerre!"
The poem follows the details of the massacre, sickening but for the power the lines display. It continues:
"And now, to crown our glory,
Get we trophies, to display
As vouchers for our story,
And mementoes of this day!
Once more, then, to the grottoes!
Gather each one all he can—
Blister'd blade with Arab mottoes,
Spear-head, bloody yataghan.
Give room now to the raven
And the dog, who scent rich fare;
And let these words be graven
On the rock-side—Vive la guerre!"
It was Mr. Patmore's sole contribution, his Muse never again being startled into any other poetical demonstration of the sort in Punch's pages. The following year he became assistant-librarian at the British Museum.
"Jacob Omnium's" first appearance, curiously enough, was with a short article which, in the reprinted works of Thackeray, has been ascribed to the novelist. This was "A Plea for Plush" (July 20th, 1846), appropriately signed "Φιλοφλυνκης," dealing, it is true, with Jeames's nether garments on a hot day, but still with no internal evidence of style to warrant its ascription to the "Fat Contributor." Henceforward his other few papers were entered to him in his own name of Matthew J. Higgins. He was a great friend of the Punch Staff, particularly of Thackeray and Leech. Of him the former had written in the "Ballad of Policeman X"—
"His name is Jacob Homnium, Exquire;
And if I'd committed crimes,
Good Lord! I wouldn't ave that mann
Attack me in the Times!—--"
while Leech took his part against Lord John Russell on the occasion of Higgins's "Story of the Mhow Court Martial." He was shown as a tall, self-possessed gentleman, saying to the little fellow, who is sparring up to him—"Pooh, go and hit one of your own size." Higgins's height, indeed, was greater than that of either Thackeray or his friend Dean Hole—six feet eight; and when the three friends walked abroad, the sensation among the passers-by was considerable. On Thackeray and Dean Hole measuring heights once in the house of a common friend, it was found that they were practically equal. "Ah, yes," exclaimed the Dean; "the cases are about the same, but one contains a poor dancing-master's fiddle, and the other a Stradivarius."
Punch's sensation of the year was the fierce revenge taken by Tennyson in its pages on Bulwer Lytton. Bulwer, as is explained elsewhere, had been set up by Punch as one of its pet butts from the very beginning; and when Tennyson's sledge-hammer onslaught was brought to them, so it is said, by a distinguished man of letters—a particular friend of both parties—they rejoiced exceedingly. Tennyson's broadside had not been unprovoked. Years before, in 1830, he had published, through Effingham Wilson, "Poems, chiefly Lyrical," which contained the poem "To a Darling Room," afterwards suppressed. Seizing on this, Lytton had re-echoed in his "New Timon: A Romance of London," the strictures which Christopher North has so severely, though good-naturedly, passed upon it in "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" for May, 1832, and furthermore taunted the Laureate with the pension of £200 which had just been conferred upon him. The attack was just the sort to extort a violent reply.
"Not mine, not mine (O, muse forbid!) the boon
Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune,
The jingling medley of purloined conceits
Out-babying Wordsworth, and out-glittering Keats,
Where all the airs of patchwork pastoral chime
To drown the ears in Tennysonian rhyme.