Mr. Punch's History of Modern England. Volume 2 of 4.—1857-1874

Mr. Gladstone, in a long speech, proposed, and Mr. Disraeli, with a gesture, seconded the proposal for granting £30,000 as dowry to Princess Louise, and £6,000 as H.R.H.'s annuity. There was loud acclamation from all parts of the House, and when Mr. Peter Taylor rose, hat in hand, to oppose the grant, the resolution had been carried. Here it may be convenient to add that, at a later stage, Mr. Taylor, rising amid groans from all sides, opposed the grant, and Sir Robert Peel expressed regret that a Princess had, by the advice of Ministers, been allowed to contract herself to the son of a Minister. Mr. Disraeli, as might be expected, treated the matter in a much more graceful way, paid a pleasant compliment to the Marquis of Lorne, and was glad that a Princess had accepted a Member of the House of Commons. Mr. Gladstone corrected Sir Robert, saying that deviation from the established rule of Royal marriage had been advised upon about eighteen months ago, and long before the engagement to the Marquis. The division was the most amusing which Mr. Punch has ever chronicled. There were, for the grant, 350; against it, 1. This unit was Mr. Fawcett, but there were really Three against the grant, namely, himself and two Tellers, Sir Charles Dilke and Mr. Peter Taylor. The Commons roared lustily, and the nation echoed the roar.

With a backing which though minute in numbers was strong in intellect, it was not to be expected that this opposition would disappear. It was again manifested over the grant to Prince Arthur in the same year, when Punch advised Sir Charles Dilke to renounce his title if he persisted in his opposition to royalties, and in 1872 Shirley Brooks gives a lively account of the debate on the proposed inquiry into the Civil List on the night of March 19, when Mr. Gladstone treated Sir Charles Dilke as Ulysses did Thersites: —

Having demolished his man, our Ulysses sat down amid astounding cheers from the Opposition as well as from his own party. Then another Aristocrat followed in the wake of the Baronet. The Honourable Auberon Herbert announced his preference for a Republic. The row then set in fiercely, and Mr. Punch inclines to draw a veil over proceedings that did not greatly redound to the credit of the House of Commons. It is true that they were an index of public opinion in the matter, but Parliament is expected to be decorous, and not to allow cock-crowing as an argument. Even the Gallic Cock could not have behaved worse. The Speaker said that the scene gave him great pain. Counts were attempted, and then strangers and reporters were excluded for an hour, and then there was a division on an attempt at adjournment – negatived by 261 to 23. Mr. Fawcett opposed the motion in a spirited and sensible speech, and denounced the mixing up the question of Republicanism with "huckstering and haggling over the cost of the Queen's household." Finally, there was division on the motion itself, and the voters for it, including Tellers, were three Aristocrats, namely, Baronets Dilke and Lawson, and Mr. Herbert, son of an Earl, and they had one friend, Mr. Anderson, of Glasgow. Against these Four were, without Tellers, Two Hundred and Seventy-Six. The House roared with laughter, and soon went away. The Republican attack on the Queen was about as contemptible as that by the lad who presented the flintless and empty pistol the other day; but in the latter case as in the former, the affair was one for the police, and Constable Gladstone A1, was quite equal to the occasion.

In the same number appears the cartoon, "Another Empty Weapon," in which "Little Charley Dilke," with a large horse-pistol labelled "Motion," is seized by the scruff of the neck by Constable Gladstone A1 as a Royal State coach is passing by.

Britannia: "Is that the sort of thing you want, you little idiot?"

Dilke returned to the charge again on the marriage of Prince Alfred (the Duke of Edinburgh) in 1874. How strongly Punch felt on this point may be gathered from the statement in the Life of Sir Charles Dilke that Shirley Brooks refused to meet him on account of his Republican speeches. The subject may be dismissed for the present with the excellent, if apocryphal, anecdote in rhyme which appeared in Punch under the heading, "A Problem Solved": —

 
About the Queen the Bart. C. Dilke
Vents talk as acid as sour milk.
Punch wants to know if this be true
Which, told to him, he tells to you —
How a great Lady deigned to wonder
At Charley's anti-Windsor thunder
"His father was so kind and mild —
I knew this gentleman a child:
I've stroked his hair. I sometimes say
I must have stroked it the wrong way."
 

The Albert Hall was opened on March 28, 1871, and the occasion is seized to administer a comprehensive rebuke to those who found it easy to laugh at the Queen, the Prince Consort, King Cole (Sir Henry Cole) and the Kensington "Boilers." That there were grounds for discontent, and that it was unwise to overlook the existence of industrial unrest, militant Radicalism and Republicanism Punch freely admits in the vigorous doggerel entitled, "Looking Facts in the Face," in which he plays the part of candid friend to Queen, Lords and Commons alike. After examining the just causes for discontent at home, the activities of Bradlaugh and Odger, and the ominous warnings furnished by the Commune and the spread of the new doctrines of Karl Marx and the Internationalists, Punch continues: —

 
So we, who don't hold that the world
To come right must be set topsy-turvy,
Those now at the helm from it hurled,
And their place taken crassâ Minervâ,
 
 
Had better look squalls in the face,
Make snug for a douche and a drenching,
And – Queen, Lords, and Commons – embrace
The supports that will stand the most wrenching.
 
 
Were I Queen, I'd not so play my rôle,
As if bent to prove those right who flout me,
And show, while folks pay the Crown toll,
How well things can go on without me.
 
 
Were I Lord, Folly's gales I would thwart,
Not by spreading my sails, but by furling 'em:
Nor expose my prestige to be caught
In the traps of the Gun Club and Hurlingham.
 
 
Were I in the Commons, I'd strive
More than one Bill a Session to carry;
Nor abreast all my 'buses to drive,
Till all in a block have to tarry.
 
 
As Queen, Lords, or Commons, in fine,
My course by the chart were I making,
I should take just the opposite line
To that Queen, Lords, and Commons are taking.
 

This was the first time that Karl Marx was mentioned in Punch. As for Odger, who is alluded to in the same verses, it may be recalled that at a meeting at Leicester held in this autumn he was credited with the statement that "me and my colleagues have resolved that the Prince of Wales shall never ascend the throne."

Anti-Monarchical Sentiment

There was undoubtedly a strong wave of anti-monarchical sentiment in England in 1871. It was not confined to agitators or extremists, but found utterance in organs which represented moderate opinion. Lord Morley in his Life of Gladstone quotes from the Pall Mall Gazette of September 29, 1871, to illustrate the depth and wide range of this discontent. He might very well have quoted Punch also as documentary evidence. The Political History of England sums up the grounds of this resentment among friendly critics not unfairly: "Ten years' seclusion from social activity and public duty seemed an excessive indulgence in the luxury of sorrow." The sympathy stirred by the Queen's illness in September, 1871, marked the beginning of a reaction; the acute anxiety "aroused by the dangerous illness of the Prince of Wales in the following December, and the subsequent rejoicings on his recovery, did much to improve the relations between Crown and people"; and Punch quotes the Queen's message of thanks to the nation as the most "acceptable Christmas gift which could have been bestowed on a loyal and affectionate people." In the verses on the Thanksgiving Service in St. Paul's on February 27 he is at pains to meet the sneers of those who only saw: —

 
A Queen, and Prince and Princess, and their Court,
And coaches passing to St. Paul's to prayer;
To settle scores with Heaven in stately sort: —
A Show for once! and our shows are so rare.
 

But the defensive tone is soon dropped for one of congratulation:

 
Happy the Queen that can, love-guarded, go
Still, through a prayerful capital, to pray
Happy among these million hearts to know
Not one but beats in tune with hers to-day.
 

It was reserved, however, for later historians to detect in the renewed political activity of the Queen evidence of her distrust in the foreign policy of Gladstone. Among the signs of the times which mark the close of this period and the great Conservative revival which followed, few are more curious than the cartoon headed, "A Brummagem Lion," inspired by the visit to Birmingham of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the courtesy displayed by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain as mayor, in spite of his Radical proclivities.

The references to foreign potentates and their relations with the British Court show little abatement of Punch's old distrust and hostility. Of the French Emperor's flying visit to Osborne in 1857 we read that it was "strictly private – none but policemen were admitted." The most friendly allusion to the Empress Eugénie refers to her having ridden in an ordinary hansom cab during a visit to England incog. in 1860. For the rest she is repeatedly attacked for her extravagance in dress, for dabbling in spiritualism, and for her interference in politics and support of the Papal pretensions. "Everyone has his oracle," says Punch late in 1862… "Didn't Numa Pompilius have his Egeria? Why, then, shouldn't Pius have his Eugenia?" In the same year she is abused for attending a bull-fight, and satirized in a cartoon representing the Emperor as Hercules and the Empress as Omphale. Punch waxes indignant at the patronage extended by the Emperor to the variety stage in 1866, and wonders whether the infection will reach our Court. But his imagination entirely failed to forecast the bestowal of decorations on the heroes of the music-hall. We have moved since then. A famous story is told of Queen Victoria in her later years sending an Equerry to inquire the name of a lively air which had been played by her Court band. The Equerry returned to say that it was a popular song of the day. The Queen was dissatisfied and instructed him to find out and let her know the words. The Equerry went back, returned and proceeded to recite the classic stanza: —

 
Come where the booze is cheaper;
Come where the pots hold more;
Come where the boss is a bit of a Joss,
Come to the pub. next door.
 

There the story unfortunately ends, without the Queen's comment. But in the pages of Punch we read how in 1869, when the Constitutional régime had just been inaugurated in France under Emile Ollivier, the programme of one of the Queen's State concerts included "Heaven Preserve the Emperor, with variations," which prompts Punch to ask, "Would not this do for the French National Anthem?" In 1865 Punch devoted a cartoon to commemorate the completion of fifty years of peace between England and France, and in 1869 another on the centenary of the first Napoleon. With the catastrophe of 1870, Sedan and its sequel of exile and suffering, Punch's hostility changed to compassion, and his In memoriam verses on the Emperor, though too laboured and too frequently disfigured by inversions to attain to the dignity of poetry, form one of the best of contemporary summaries and estimates of the career and character of the dead ruler: —

 
Already scores of ready penmen draft
Of his life's course to power their bird's-eye view,
Through poverty and perjury and craft,
And redder stains that the blurred track imbrue.
 
 
Let whoso will count of his faults the cost,
And point a moral in his saddened end;
This is the thought in England uppermost —
He who has died among us, lived our friend.
 
 
If sinners may by suffering, too, be shriven,
What penance those lost years had to sustain!
The sting of fall and failure deeper driven
By the dull stroke of slow and sleepless pain.
 
 
The time to weigh him fairly is not now;
Nor are the true weights any France can bring:
That sprang to fix the crown upon his brow,
And her own neck beneath his feet to fling.
 
 
Heavily both have answered for their sin:
Nor did the Emperor heavier fall undo,
Than France, that backed him still while he could win,
Nor turned against him till the luck turned too.¹³
 
 
But now 'tis England, and not France that stands
Silent beside an Exile's dying bed,
Mindful of kindness received by his hands,
Sorrowing with those that sorrow for their dead.
 

Punch, as was made clear in the previous volume, was no lover of Prussian rule. On the eve of the war on Denmark he published a truly ferocious attack on King Wilhelm: —

THE SONG OF HOHENZOLLERN

Air – "The Standard Bearer."

French Emperor and Prussian King

 
I am a King; I reign by Right Divine,
As did my sires some hundred years before me;
Howe'er their crown was got, I came to mine,
Obey me then, O people, and adore me.
 
 
My seat I plant upon mine ancient Throne,
And order back the waves of Revolution.
My will the law, I sit supreme, alone,
My footstool is the Prussian Constitution.
 
 
Tsar Alexander's cause mine own I've made,
Regardless of the blame of any journal.
To crush the Poles I render him my aid;
Help him enforce his discipline paternal.
 
 
I lend a hand to catch the runaway,
The fugitive hand over to the slaughter;
And, on my mind, whatever you may say
Makes no more mark than what blows leave in water.
 
 
I'm called the Hangman's Cad, and I don't care
For that dishonourable appellation.
I carry Poland's garbage to the Bear,
Serene amid the loudest execration.
 
 
My mind is bent on arbitrary rule;
In policy I copy my late Brother.
If you presume to say he was a fool,
You'll very likely dare call me another.
 

Hostility to Prussia did not abate in the succeeding years, and in 1866 indignation is expressed at a rumour that the Queen was about to visit Germany. A general friendliness towards King Victor Emmanuel did not prevent Punch from insinuating that he had sold his birthright to the French Emperor, and from expressing the fear that Sardinia as well as Savoy would be ceded to France. The most that can be said of his treatment of the Tsar Alexander II is that it was not quite so vehemently hostile as that meted out to his father. As early as January, 1862, we read that "the Russian Empire, with its body of brass and its feet of clay, will, if it does not take care, be requiring some support some day, to keep it up, on account of the extreme 'weakness of its legs.'"

The annals of Royalty, outside England, certainly afforded little scope for admiration. But the year 1865 was enlivened by a humorous instance of misplaced monarchical ambition. The King of Abyssinia, who had detained certain British subjects as prisoners, "was said to have favoured Queen Victoria with an offer of marriage, and to have imprisoned her lieges in revenge for her non-appreciation of his dusky love."

GENERAL SOCIAL LIFE

From a variety of causes, most of which have been already discussed, reformers, humanitarians and critics of the established order generally display less resentment and acrimony throughout the mid-Victorian period. We have already hinted that the mellowing of Punch's temper may have been due in part to the death of Douglas Jerrold. But the fact remains that Punch had already begun to find less incentive to and less excuse for the saeva indignatio which animated his earlier tirades against the aristocracy, and the selfish detachment of the titled classes. The spectacle of the Cream of Society disporting themselves at Cremorne to the exclusion of the general public is satirized in 1858, but the satire is tempered by the admission that this aristocratic "jamboree" was organized for a charitable purpose and brought in substantial proceeds. An analysis of the special butts of Punch's satire reveals the interesting fact that, while not enjoying a complete immunity from criticism, the dukes are not only displaced from their unenviable pre-eminence, they almost disappear as targets for invective. We find attacks on the promotion of "well-connected politicians" à propos of Lord Clanricarde's appointment as Privy Seal in 1858; and verses in the same year on the worship of the peerage, with "John Bull loves a lord" as text, but the flunkeydom of the Press is already a far less frequent theme of scarifying comment. Punch's favourite occupation as the reviler of "Jenkins" was gone by the 'sixties, but snobbery in high places was not dead. Sir Benjamin Brodie, Sergeant-Surgeon to William IV and Queen Victoria, had been made a baronet in 1834; in 1858, when he was President of the Royal Society, there was some talk of his being made a peer, and Punch in December of that year bitterly attacked the influences and prejudices which he believed were effectual in preventing the bestowal of the honour.

Host: "Nice party, ain't it, Major Le Spunger? 'Igh and low, rich and poor —most people are welcome to this 'ouse! This is 'Liberty 'All,' this is! No false pride or 'umbug about me! I'm a self-made man, I am!"

The Major: "Very nice party, indeed, Mr. Shoddy! How proud your father and mother must feel! Are they here?"

Host: "Well, no! 'Ang it all, you know, one must draw the line somewhere!"

Peers and Commerce

The reign of the old nobility, however, was not merely threatened by outspoken criticism. The situation crystallized in the title of the play, New Men and Old Acres, was already a real thing; prosperous cotton-spinners were beginning to buy estates; by 1865 Punch was contrasting the new representatives of the landed interest with their feudal predecessors – very much to the disadvantage of the former – and by the 'seventies the contrast was a favourite theme of Du Maurier. Simultaneously the converse tendency of the aristocracy to go into trade is noted, but with little sympathy. Thus we find in 1863 the prospectus of the Noble Hotel-keepers' Association (Limited) headed by a list of parasitic peers, including the Duke of Dangleton, the Duke of Dawdleton, the Duke of Diddleton, the Marquis of Hardupton, the Earl of Toadington, Viscount Ortolan, the Lord Verisopht, Sir Lionel Rattlecash, Bart., and so on; and a double-page cartoon shows the scene in the coffee-room of one of the Hotels in which "gents" of different types are being waited on by coronetted and bewhiskered peers. Greed rather than business capacity is indicated as the characteristic of the new recruits of commerce, and the annals of the last fifty years have furnished disastrous and even tragic examples of the results of this titled invasion of the City. Experience has shown that on the whole it is safer to gain a peerage by success in commerce than to exploit a peerage as a short cut to making money.

"Tell me, my dear, who's that little man they all seem so dotingly fond of?"

"That, Uncle? Oh, that's Lord Alberic Lackland!"

"Well, he's not much to look at!"

"No, poor fellow! But he's awfully hard up, and Mamma always likes to have a lord at her dances, so Papa gives him ten guineas to come – that is, lends it, you know – and a guinea extra for every time my brother Bob calls him Ricky!"

Commercialism in high places offended Punch's notion of noblesse oblige. Much the same sentiment inspired his vehement protest against our selling the house in which Napoleon died at St. Helena for 180,000 francs: "We have an especial dislike to this traffic in a great man's grave. It is turning the funeral urn into a money-box with a vengeance – the vengeance of a miserly shopkeeper." On the other hand, complaints of extravagance and waste, though not so strident as of late years, are freely uttered in connexion with official dinners or loyal demonstrations – for example, when the Prince and Princess of Wales visited Chester in 1869, the Mayor's subscription alone amounted to £500.

In the domain of Commerce and Economics no movement in the Victorian age was more fruitful of results than that of co-operation. But a history of the system which began with Owen, took concrete shape in the famous venture of the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844 – twenty-eight working men with a capital of £38 – and led to the multiplication of Workmen's Co-operative Societies all over the country, is outside the limits of this survey. The movement came from below; Punch was mainly if not entirely interested in its development as it affected the well-to-do classes by the establishment of "the Stores," and their competition with retail shops, and in the grievances of purchasers and their servants who had to carry their parcels home – grievances which reach their climax in the year 1868. In other words, he approaches the subject as an irresponsible social satirist, not as a student of economics. His pages only show the froth of the movement, not its deep underlying current. So, too, with the cult of Social Science. The periodic Congresses furnished him in the main with matter for chaff, though in 1858 he appeals to the moral engineers of the Social Science Association to devise some means of utilizing "social sewage" – swindlers, fraudulent bankers and trustees. The shortcomings of British cookery always found in Punch a candid critic, but he had no sympathy for those journalists who sought to remedy the deficiency by the publication of elaborate and expensive daily menus. Such instruction was a mockery to the poor who had not enough to eat, and did not know how to cook the little they had.

Banting and "Hydros"

An interesting treatise might be written on Victorian diseases and their remedies. The worship of pastime, exercise and athletics was still in its infancy; whatever its drawbacks, it has undoubtedly given a new lease of life to the middle-aged. Obesity, due in great measure to over-eating and lack of exercise, was the nightmare of the well-to-do, and, if proof be required of the statement, one need only refer to the success of the movement initiated by Banting. Inasmuch as he was a fashionable undertaker – he was responsible for the construction of the Duke of Wellington's funeral car – there was an element of disinterestedness in his efforts to promote longevity. He was also a living example of the virtue of his method, for he reduced himself many stones in weight by the use of non-fat-producing foods. "He had a whalebone frame made to fit his once large waistcoats and coats, and wore the whole over his reduced size – removing this armour to produce a full effect."¹⁴ His famous letter to the Press "On Corpulence" rang through the land: his name was a household word in the 'sixties, and he enriched our vocabulary with a noun and verb which are enshrined in the classic pages of the New English Dictionary, though they are practically unknown to the Georgian generation. Hustle and exercise and nerves have removed the evil against which he warred, and in an age in which excessive bulk is a rarity, the name of Banting has passed into semi-oblivion. But Punch's Almanack for 1864 is full of it and him, and for a good many years Banting was as familiar in the mouths of men as Pussyfoot is to-day.

The campaign against over-indulgence was not confined to an attack on starch, fat and sugar. In the 'fifties hydropathy had come to stay, and in the 'sixties hydropathic establishments were to be found all over the British islands and in America, though the abbreviation of "hydro" was not introduced till later. Fortunes were made – and lost – in these institutions, and they still exist, though some of the most sumptuous "hydros" have undergone curious vicissitudes and conversions. One of the best known of all was used as a girls' school during the War. But the rigour of the water-cure treatment was only enforced in the early years of the movement; proprietors gradually realized that it did not pay to run their establishments as uncomfortable hospitals, and with a laxer administration the whole system fell somewhat into discredit. The convivial Punch never smiled on it, as may be gathered from the verses he printed in March, 1869, when hydropathy was still in its prime, on "Sound Port and Principles." They must not, however, be taken to represent Punch's own views, for he was no lover of guzzling. The poem is really a satire, but it is partly inspired by Punch's inveterate dislike of the teetotal fanatics.

Surgery was active, though the days of appendicitis and adenoids were still a long way off. Punch, however, was more interested in mental maladies and the pathology of the social system. The Victorian age had no monopoly of superstition and credulity, but prophets and spiritualists and diviners reaped a rich harvest in the 'fifties and 'sixties. The comet of 1857 caused a good deal of anxiety, so much so, that in December of that year an insolvent butcher gave as a reason for his failure "the loss he had sustained in June, when the comet was expected, by a large quantity of meat being spoilt." Dr. Cumming was assiduous in prophesying the end of the world, but unfortunately Punch ascertained that the doctor had renewed the lease of his house for fifty years, and the prophet's defence of his action did not mend matters: —

Mr. Punch finds in a Liverpool journal the following part of a lecture which Dr. Cumming has been delivering on Prophecy: —

"He had been, he said, taunted in the columns of Punch with having, notwithstanding his belief that the world was to come to an end in 1867, recently renewed the lease of his cottage for 50 years. The accusation, he said, although not literally, was generally true, but his answer to it was, that a belief in prophecy should not override commonsense. The doctor was frequently applauded throughout his eloquent lecture."

And by no person should he have been applauded more loudly than by Mr. Punch, if that gentleman had had the good fortune to be in the schoolroom at Claughton, where the lecture is reported to have been delivered. The last quoted sentence is so admirably frank that Mr. Punch cannot withhold his tribute of veneration. In other words, although it is all very well, in the way of business, to work the old Hebrew scrolls, which boil down into capital stock for the rather thin yet spicy soup vended by our Doctor, he has no notion of eating his own cookery. We wish we were as certain of our friend's orthography as we are of his commonsense, and would give a trifle (say the next three hundred Tupperian sonnets) to know whether, in his private ledger, he does not spell Prophets as worldly people spell the opposite of Losses.

Mr. Foxer (a medium): "Oh, dear! There's a spirit named Walker writing on my arm!"

"Diviners and Dupes"

The chief exploiters of credulity, however, were to be found in the ranks of spiritualists, mediums, clairvoyantes and professional somnambulists. Men of science still held aloof from this traffic with the unseen, and its terminology was crude, but the methods and results were strangely familiar. Spirit drawings, forerunners of spirit photographs, are mentioned as early as 1857. Under the heading of "Diviners and Dupes" Punch deals harshly with the advertisements of the clairvoyantes and diviners, and once more returns to his familiar complaint against the harrying of humble fortune-tellers while fashionable impostors escaped: —

The gipsies are hardly dealt with in being convicted as rogues and vagabonds for telling fortunes by the cards or the palm of the hand, whilst practitioners in Clairvoyance get their hands crossed with silver, or with postage-stamps, with perfect impunity. There is clearly one law for the Romany, and another for Somnambulists.

David Dunglas Home, born near Edinburgh, of Scottish parents, and descended on his mother's side from a family supposed to be gifted with second sight, returned in 1856 from America where he had spent his youth and early manhood, and in 1860, when he was at the zenith of his fame, elicited a scoffing tribute from Punch under the heading, "Home, Great Home." The first stanza of this poem, which is accompanied by a picture representing a spirit hand placing a wreath on the head of a lady with a goose's head, refers to Home's famous feats of "levitation" or rising in the air as if impelled by some unknown force. Punch was stubbornly sceptical of the whole business. But if any medium ever deserved the title of "great" it was Home. Did he not inspire Browning to write his famous "Sludge, the Medium" – though Mrs. Browning is said to have been a believer? Anyhow, the list of his converts is too remarkable to justify Punch's contemptuous disparagement. It included Dr. Robert Chambers, Dr. Lockhart Robertson, the editor of the Journal of Mental Science, John Elliotson, a distinguished physiologist, S. C. Hall, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, F.R.S., the Earl of Dunraven, and the late Sir William Crookes, F.R.S. Home was received into the Church of Rome and had an audience of the Pope in 1856, and eight years later was expelled from Rome as a sorcerer – a tremendous testimony to his powers. He married twice into the Russian noblesse, his first wife being a god-daughter of the Tsar Nicholas, and he gave repeated séances before his son Alexander II. The infatuation of the Russian Court for wonder-workers and miracle-mongers was hereditary, and of late years became tragically notorious, but Home was received with equal favour by the King of Prussia, the Emperor and Empress of the French, and the Queen of Holland. The "Spiritual Athenæum" (no connexion, need one say, with the august institution at the corner of Pall Mall) which he founded in 1866 had but a short life, and the gift of £60,000, which he received from a rich widow, was revoked as the result of a Chancery suit, the lady alleging he had obtained it by spiritual influence. But we have it on the authority of the D.N.B. that he "was not a professional medium, and scrupulously abstained from taking money for his séances," which answers Punch's sneer at his lucrative traffic with spirits. The writer of the notice concludes with the words, "his history presents a curious and unsolved problem." Taken all round, he was by far the most remarkable personality in spiritualistic circles in the nineteenth century, and "imagination's widest stretch" fails to shadow forth the influence he might have exerted had he flourished sixty years later. Let us be thankful that he lived when he did, and freely own that, if an impostor, he was an impostor of genius and emphatically not a Rasputin.