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

 
Strikes follow strikes; the reason why,
High wages rendered prices high;
Then Working-Men for wages higher
Struck, and to still more pay aspire.
Such aspiration what will crown?
It is "Excelsior!" upside down.
 

When Lord Lyttelton, at a harvest festival at Hagley, compared the conduct of the agricultural labourers with the extravagance of the workmen in the Black Country, Punch, disavowing all criticism of the Black Country as dangerous, made bold to ask how it was possible for a Northern pitman to save his means: —

He has only a house found him, rent-free, all the coals he requires, medical attendance and medicine when he or any member of his family is ill, and, at the lowest, seven shillings a day. For this miserable wage, and for these trumpery advantages, the artisan of the pit is expected to do, actually, six hours' work daily. How, thus crushed and starved, can he save anything? If a malignant aristocrat suggests that many an educated gentleman manages on far less, working, moreover, twice as hard, bringing up a family in the right way, and even paying for life assurance, Mr. Punch scorns to argue with a bloated Dives, who would compare a white-handed swell with Nature's nobleman, the hardy son of toil, and the real strength and glory of the nation. Heave a coal at the head of the insolent cynic.

In 1873 the wages in some collieries had gone up to 10s. or 15s. a day: —

Victims of the Income Tax

To be content with from 10s. to 15s. a day is to be satisfied with, say, some £234 a year. If that is to be earned by mining here, there can be no inducement for any skilled miner to betake himself to gold or diamond diggings. He can live in clover, on enough to satisfy all his wants, by raising black diamonds at home. For a miner, an income of the above amount is a salary much more adequate than £5,000 for a Law Officer of the Crown. The miner has no appearances to keep up in a mine. He need not incur any expenses but those which are necessary for his personal wants and pleasures, including champagne and dog-fighting; which, the former luxury as well as the latter amusement, he can manage to afford well enough by a judicious economy above-ground, of lodgings, furniture, and clothes.

Coals went up to 50s. a ton in London this year and the cry of the middle classes, of whom Punch was now the great champion, was echoed with great fervour in an article on a speech by Sir William, then Mr. Vernon Harcourt: —

Mr. Vernon Harcourt, in some of his late speeches, has placed himself in striking contrast with most of the other leading politicians, both Liberal and Conservative, by speaking the truth. For example, at the Druids' Dinner the other day, in discussing the impost by which the incomes of a part of the people are taxed to pay the expenses of the whole, instead of attempting to defend confiscation with sophistry, and to stifle complaint with sneers, he condemned the false and dishonest apology, alleged by financial swindlers' advocates on behalf of the Income-tax, that it weighs only on the rich who are well able to pay it, and he maintained that, on the contrary, it falls "with the greatest severity on the poorest of all the classes of the community – that which, upon limited means and small profits, has to keep up a state of respectability." The lie which Mr. Vernon Harcourt refuted is one of those lies which Statesmen are very apt to tell in talking to simpletons; lies coupled with truths, from which the generality of people at public meetings have not sense enough to disentangle them. It is quite true that the rich are well able to pay the Income-tax; but to say that the Income-tax weighs only on them is telling a falsehood which transcends common lying. The rich, as a rule, can afford to live up to their incomes, and it matters nothing to wealthy people whether their incomes are taxed, or duties are imposed upon the luxuries on which they expend them. The class rightly described by Mr. Harcourt as the poorest of the country consists of persons under the necessity of living as much within their incomes as possible. They need to make all the provision that ever they can against ruin constantly staring them in the face. The Income-tax, substituted for indirect taxation, wrings from them the savings they ought to put by, and, by way of compensation, offers them the advantage of buying cheapened superfluities, which, how cheap soever, are too dear for them at any price. Thus are their slender incomes in large measure confiscated by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and amends are made them with facilities to squander the rest.

My Lady: "I'm afraid I must give up the pine-apple, Mr. Green! Eight shillings is really too much!"

Successful Collier: "Just put 'un up for me, then, Master. 'Ere's 'arf a sovereign; and look 'ere – yer may keep the change if yer'll only tell us 'ow to cook 'un!"

Colliers and Cormorants

References to the champagne-habit among the miners abound throughout this year. A picture shows a miner buying a pine-apple which a lady could not afford. Their practice of travelling first-class is also reprobated. But the bitterest explosion of Punch's wrath against the pampered aristocrats of industry was provoked by a speech in which John Bright complacently dwelt on "the growth of material prosperity and comfort in every class." To this Punch vehemently demurred: —

Clerks of all kinds, Civil servants, fund-holders and annuitants with fixed incomes, landowners, doctors, lawyers, and professional men in general, is that so? Do you find it so?

When Mr. Bright said "every class," did he not mean to say, or, at least, should he not have said "certain classes"? It is quite true that the shoddy class, and the class of great speculators, have prospered exceedingly, to as great an increase of their material comfort as increasing wealth could procure them. A proportionate growth of material comfort and prosperity has obviously been experienced by the operatives and mechanics, otherwise called the Working Classes – although there are classes who may be said to do some little work, other than manual labour, to be sure. Do not coal-miners for a fair day's work obtain at least a full two days' wages; do they not drink champagne; and have not they and the rest of our flesh-and-blood amongst them, drunk us out of the Alabama difficulty? They have grown in content too – the Striking Classes. They and the other classes that grasp with one hand and squander with the other, and go on grasping and squandering, and thereby raising prices higher and higher every day, they, all of them, indeed are without doubt increasingly prosperous and comfortable, but they are not everybody. There are a very great many other people besides, who constitute everybody else, and these, so far from being more prosperous and comfortable than they once were, can now no longer afford the luxuries, or even the necessaries, they then could, but have to go without.

The ugly phrase about the Alabama claims was not Punch's own coinage, but he was not in a mood to mince his words where the miners were concerned. The charges against overpaid workmen and profiteers have a strangely familiar ring. And so has the reference, though not under the now familiar name, to the practice of "Ca' Canny," which, however, had been in occasional use for many years before Punch suggested, in 1874, that it might be met by reprisals: —

COLLIERS AND CORMORANTS

The Sheffield Daily Telegraph informs consumers, already subjected by producers to excessive extortion, that at Motherwell: —

"At a mass meeting of Scotch miners on Thursday, 3,000 colliers resolved to work only four days per week, and only eight hours per day, in order to reduce the output, and to keep up prices."

But suppose the butchers and poulterers combined against them, as they combine against the public, what then? And could not the vintners agree to raise "these rapacious colliers' Champagne to some four or five pounds a bottle? Perhaps they will try.

Already Lord Shaftesbury had spoken plainly on the results of that "enormous increase of wages which had lately taken place in nearly every class of working men," even going to the length of endorsing the view that high wages, when unaccompanied by self-control, were the curse of the working classes: —

Of course, where economy and prudence were practised the condition of the Working Man should be improved by higher wages; but there was recklessness and improvidence. The sudden increase of money had been productive of the greatest possible mischief, and so long as these habits continued he could not but think that an increase of wages was a positive infliction to the Working Man, his wife, and his children.

This bold statement prompted Punch to reduce the argument to an absurdity, or something near it, by suggesting that the true way of planting the spirit of self-control in the minds of the people would be simply to lower their wages to the requisite standard. Simultaneously he vindicates the character of the working classes for thrift and sobriety in the following ironical eulogium: —

The Working Classes, it is surely not too much to say, spend every little increase of wages they obtain by their harmless strikes chiefly in the education of their children, and in the purchase of the appliances needful to make home happy. If they are at all extravagant is it not in books, and in the dress which some of them are a little too apt to lavish on their wives? For the vast improvement evident in their habits we have to thank not only the Licensing Act, but also the Trades' Unions Act; and moreover the Conservative Reform Bill, which has rendered them, as Mr. Lowe said, our masters – if not their own.

 

First Ruffian: "Wot was I hup for, and wot 'ave I got? Well, I floor'd a woman and took 'er watch, and I've got two years and a floggin'."

Second Ruffian: "Ha! I flung a woman out o' the top floor winder; an' I've on'y got three months!"

First Ruffian: "Ah, but then she was yer wife!"

Punch and Capital Punishment

The reference to working men's wives is especially ironical, for Punch was at this time engaged in a vigorous campaign of protest against the very lenient sentences passed on men for brutal assaults on their wives. References to this subject abound in these years in prose and verse and cartoons, culminating in the year 1874. He strongly supported resort to flogging in such cases. We have already noticed the modification, indeed the practical abandonment, of his old hostility to capital punishment. The cause of this conversion is curious. It is hardly too much to say that it was largely the result of a remarkable speech made by John Stuart Mill – a true humanitarian if ever there was one – on the measure introduced in April, 1868, to make executions private. Punch, though he often differed from Mill, had the greatest respect for his fearless independence and integrity, and was evidently profoundly impressed by Mill's speech⁵ in reply to Mr. Charles Gilpin (the Member for Northampton), who had argued in favour of the abolition of capital punishment, and we find the following admirable summary of it in his "Essence of Parliament": —

The speech of the night was that of Mr. Mill, who approved of many of the labours of the "philanthropists," but said that they ought to know when to stop. To deprive a criminal of the life of which he had proved himself unworthy – solemnly to blot him out from the fellowship of mankind, and from the catalogue of the living – was the most appropriate and the most impressive mode in which society could deal with so great a crime as murder. Imprisonment would be far more cruel, and less efficacious. None could say that this punishment had failed, for none could say who had been deterred, and how many would not have been murderers but for the awful idea of the gallows. Do not bring about an enervation, an effeminacy in the mind of the nation; for it is that to be more shocked by taking a man's life than by taking all that makes life valuable. Is death the greatest of all earthly ills? A manly education teaches us the contrary; if an evil at all, it is one not high in the list of evils. Respect the capacity of suffering, not of merely existing. It is not human life only, not human life as such, but human feelings, that should be held sacred. Moreover, taking life for murder no more implies want of respect for life than fining a criminal shows want of respect for property. In countries where execution is morbidly disliked there is no abhorrence of the assassin. Mr. Mill added that we had been in danger of reducing all our punishments to nothing; and, though that disposition had stopped, our penalties⁶ for brutal crimes (for which he earnestly recommended the Scourge) were ridiculously light, and ought to be strengthened.

The Organ Grinder Nuisance.

It will be noted that Mill here met the argument which Punch had advanced in earlier years as to the relative severity of long imprisonment and capital punishment, and answered it on the humanitarian ground that the former was more cruel as well as less efficacious. Mill, as we notice elsewhere, had more than anyone else shaken Punch's hostility to woman suffrage, but the effect of his speech on capital punishment was even greater. It must not be forgotten, however, that Mill had been in the forefront of the movement for securing the prosecution of General Eyre for his drastic suppression of the riots in Jamaica. Punch supported General Eyre throughout, and it may well have been that on the question of capital punishment he was influenced by the principle fas est et ab hoste doceri, even though the opponent was undermining his own position. On more general grounds one can well understand that Punch, as an independent observer and thinker, would admire and be impressed by the candour and detachment from party ties which marked Mill's political career.

The change in Punch's views on the claims of Labour, especially organized labour, has already been sufficiently illustrated. But it did not prevent his espousing the cause of workers where the conditions were bad, the hours long and the pay inadequate. Punch's protracted campaign against the organ grinders was no doubt to a considerable extent due to Leech's sensitive nerves, and to sympathy with brain-workers such as Babbage, the mathematician, who declared that "one quarter of his entire working power had been destroyed by audible nuisances," but his support of Mr. Bass's Bill in 1864 was largely based on the fact that the business was conducted by undesirable aliens, and that the Italian padrone was an employer of sweated labour. In 1871 there is a cartoon satirizing the strong measures taken by the police against a demonstration of child match-makers at a time when adult agitators were allowed to preach Revolution and Communism in Hyde Park, and in the same year and month, when a post-mistress was convicted of theft and forgery, the evil is traced to the temptation to which underpaid officials were subjected. Punch had already predicted that in any national emergency the patriotism of the mercantile marine could be implicitly relied on, a prophecy splendidly realized in the Great War, and in 1873 he lent a vigorous helping hand to Samuel Plimsoll in his campaign against the "Coffin-Ships": —

 
Let horrified shipowners never so oft
His charges, indignant, fling back,
I call him the cherub who sits up aloft
To keep watch for the life of Poor Jack!
 

Simultaneously Punch printed a cartoon assuming that "Jack" would never again be sent to sea in one of "Davy Jones's decoy ducks." This was rather premature, as Plimsoll's campaign to secure the compulsory load-line which began in 1870, and in which he showed more zeal than discretion, did not lead to legislation until 1876. But with all his faults Plimsoll earned his title of "The Sailor's Friend" and justified Punch's salutation.

Polly: "Oh, dear Jack! I can't help crying, but I'm so happy to think you're not going in one of those dreadful ships!"

Jack: "What, Davy Jones's decoy ducks! No, no, lass – never more. Thanks to our friend Master Plimsoll, God bless him!"

THE CHURCHES

The annals of Church and State history were rich in events of prime importance during the years 1857-1874. When one reflects that this short period witnessed the removal of Jewish disabilities, the publication of Essays and Reviews, the much-canvassed appointments of Temple and Stanley, the resounding controversies which arose over Colenso and Jowett, the Mackonochie and Purchas trials, and the Disestablishment of the Irish Church, it will be seen that Punch, in view of the keen interest he had taken from the very first in the relations of Church and State and Society, found an almost embarrassing wealth of material for comment and criticism. On all these subjects he had a good deal to say, and he said it with very much the same mixture of intolerance and common sense, of rationalism and reverence which marked his utterances in earlier years. He professed to represent the majority of English Protestants: he was avowedly Erastian in his maintenance of the supremacy of the Law Courts in all cases; he was the unrelenting enemy of Extreme Ritual, the Confessional, and any attempts to revive monasticism; and on occasion he was ready to bang the "No Popery" drum as loudly as ever.

When Béranger died in 1857, his burial prompted a tribute in verse which begins with the lines: —

 
Ah Béranger, you brave old singer,
Of all the things you hated worst,
That felt your lash's lustiest stinger
Tyrant and Jesuit were first.
 

In Punch's view there was nothing to choose between the two. But his hostility was not confined to one Order: it embraced Vaticanism in the widest sense, and there were many moments when he anticipated, and acted on, Gambetta's phrase, "Le cléricalisme, c'est l'ennemi." Thus, to take one instance, the demonstration of Irish Roman Catholics at Blackheath at the close of 1862 moved him to fury. It was the time of the French occupation of Rome, and the spectacle of these "Irish Yahoos" hurrooing for the Pope and groaning for Garibaldi was altogether too much for Punch. He would have quenched their zeal for the "temporal absolutism" of the Pope with water from a fire-engine, and he described the demonstrators as "prepared to shed the last drop of their blood if the perpetual enslavement of the Romans should require that precious sacrifice." The French, by their intervention, were only "propping by force the rule of superstition." This was just after Garibaldi had been wounded at Aspromonte, and when the bullet was removed Punch said that this, at any rate, was a true relic. Rome – Papal Rome – was to him the Scarlet Lady, a red rag to John Bull.

As a set-off to this special hostility to the Roman Communion, it is only fair to admit that other Churches and Sectarianism generally came in for a great deal of shrewd and, at times, bitter criticism. Punch was by no means an orthodox Churchman. Kingsley and Maurice and Stanley were his heroes. He stood for comprehension and toleration, and fair play for the "Higher Criticism." He had far more sympathy with underpaid curates than opulent bishops – indeed, he had little respect for the episcopal bench, if we except Temple and Tait.

The Sabbatarianism of Evangelicals, Presbyterians, and Nonconformists generally, continued to excite him to indignation or derision – as when in 1858 Sunday walking was tabooed by some Scots fanatics, who also sought to stop all Sunday sailings, or when early in 1861 a controversy arose in Scotland as to whether the sale of milk was permissible on that day.⁷

In 1868 the Lord's Day Observance Society addressed a memorial to the Brighton Railway Company against Sunday trains, which ended as follows: —

"Lastly, as recognizing the Christian principle of a particular Providence, we cannot conceal from ourselves the conviction of the signal instances of the Divine displeasure in two accidents on the Sabbath Day, one of which in the Clayton Tunnel ended in the hurrying of several lives in a moment of time into eternity and which, in a financial point of view, resulted in a loss to the proprietary of not less than £50,000."

Punch acidly comments on the authors of this "pretty specimen of snuffle," that they evidently know no more about the Grand Prix than they do about the Tower of Siloam.

The notion that Sunday should be a day of gloom and that religion should be divorced from cheerfulness found no support in Punch. A few years later, that is in 1871, he records with amazement the utterance of a Scottish minister who, at a children's soirée held at Kincardine, forbade them to applaud, and told them "there would be nothing of that kind, and no laughter in Heaven." In the same year, under the heading of "Sabbatarian Progress," we read: —

 
The Sunday Closing Bill's referred
To a select committee,
We view concession to absurd
Fanaticism with pity.
 

It was the same year that Punch got into hot water over a picture of Keene's. In it an old lady remarks to a guest: "They're all alike, my dear. There's our Susan (it's true she's a Dissenter), but I've allowed her to go to Chapel three times every Sunday since she has lived with me, and I assure you she doesn't cook a bit better than she did the first day!!" The Young Men's Christian Association at Dover, in consequence of this flippancy, decided that they would not take in Punch as being a paper hostile to religion. Punch displayed a ribald impenitence, making great play with the speeches delivered by the Mayor, Mr. Knocker, and a Mr. Mowll, and the hostile decree was rescinded shortly afterwards.

Glaring Contrasts in the Church

When the scandal of the sale by public auction of pews in fashionable churches came up in 1858 it was used as a stick with which to beat Puseyism. But when the Bishop of Exeter, on April 23, made an eloquent appeal in connexion with the want of church accommodation for the people, denounced the pew system as illegal, and declared that to seat only fifty-eight per cent. of the inhabitants of London 670,000 sittings would be required, Punch, forgetting his ancient feud with "Henry of Exeter," congratulated him on these gleams of real liberality. But what chiefly concerned Punch as a Church Reformer were the glaring contrasts which existed in the "richest and poorest Church in the world." He was disgusted at the "snobbery" of the archbishops in kindly sanctioning a Registry for Curates, like a Registry for Servants: —

… It would appear from these figures [quoted from The Times], that Curates are expected to perform the cure of souls about as cheaply as the salters work the cure of herrings. Well, Floreat Ecclesia! and Heaven bless the Bishops! Of course, it's all just as it should be, or the Registry of Church Servants would never have been sanctioned. The Bishops have full knowledge of the present scale of wages at which Curates may be hired, and by sanctioning the registry they, of course, approve the scale. So, Floreat Ecclesia! and Heaven bless the Bishops! The Curates are the men-of-all-work in the Church, and receive as recompense a maid-of-all-work's wages. Proportionally, their pay is really not much more: for they have to live like gentlemen, which kitchen servants have not.

"Ah, Bishop, what a heavenly sermon that was of yours last Sunday, about worldliness and the vanities of the flesh! – it nearly made me cry! And I say, Bishop, how hard it hit you and me!!!"

When the question of revising and shortening Church Services was discussed in the same year, Punch suggested as an alternative the discontinuance of all sermons except on special occasions. But the most pointed of his criticisms throughout this period are directed against Ritualism and in particular the use of the Confessional. High Anglican Ritualism was to him the Chambermaid of the Vatican. As for the Confessional, it was "a dangerous and disgusting practice."

Father Ignatius

In the autumn of 1858 Punch printed a cartoon on "Soapy Sam's" dangerous flirtation with the Scarlet Lady, accompanied by a letter advocating more drastic treatment of those who practised the Confessional, and later on in the year Tait, then Bishop of London, is applauded for his intention to deal faithfully with Ritualists and credited with saying: "You must not bring your toys to Church." Punch's attacks on the Ritualists exhibit a steady crescendo in freedom and even brutality through the 'sixties, and, admitting the sincerity of his dislike, little excuse can be found for the publication of such tasteless pictures as that, for example, of the sentimental young lady who observes to her sister, à propos of a sandalled curate, that "it is no use working slippers for him, and mother says he doesn't wear braces." Throughout the years 1864 and 1865 the vagaries of Brother, or Father Ignatius (the Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne) are held up to unqualified contempt. But this "Histrio Anglicanus," as Punch called him, invited ridicule by his extravagances and those of his troop of mimic monks. The point of Punch's attack was that they were not real members of a monastic order, but mountebanks who played at being Romanists and occasionally imposed on Roman Catholics by their "profane tomfoolery." Father Ignatius, moreover, was doubly obnoxious to Punch, for he was not only a mock monk, but an extreme obscurantist who fulminated against the Higher Criticism and all liberal theologians. No quarter was therefore given to him in verse or prose. He is treated in "Spoiling the Game" as a dangerous lunatic: —

 
Brother Ignatius wears a monk's gown
(A strait waistcoat were suitable wear),
Brother Ignatius shaveth his crown —
'Twould be well were his whole head shaved bare.
 

Ardent Ritualist: "Oh, Athanasius, it's charmingly becoming!"

At this time Father Ignatius was established in Norwich; it was in after years that he moved to Llanthony Abbey in the Black Mountains, a most appropriate choice of residence; and the campaign of contempt reached a ribald climax in the issue of July 15, 1865, which contained "A Modern Gregorian Tone: a Chaunt pointed according to the Use of Norwich." This Chaunt, which was founded on an actual dissension amongst the brotherhood, gives an extremely diverting account of the mutiny provoked by the rigorous dietary imposed by the Superior – with dispensations in his own favour. It is "funny without being vulgar." But the prose article on the next page, "Ignatius and his Monkeys," deviates into scurrility at the outset: —

It is not true that Brother Ignatius and the monks, his associates, have removed from their monastery at Norwich to the Zoological Gardens, Regent's Park, and there taken up their abode in the Monkey House.

Where Punch showed a want of justice as well as of perspective was in treating all or nearly all Ritualists as if they were on the same level with Father Ignatius. In 1869, when Mr. Mackonochie maintained the claim of "Church Courts for Church Causes," Punch was not content with declaring that parsons were unfit to do legal justice; he challenged them to declare whether they were prepared to emulate the example and martyrdom of Becket; he bade them get their heads shaved or betake themselves to Rome. The "Pastoral to Mr. Mackonochie and Co." shows a slightly more conciliatory spirit, and admits that they were gentlemen and scholars, and did a great deal of practical good and hard work among the poor. None the less Punch charges them with playing a game – "a game dangerous to your own morality and that of your party-spirited followers, who almost believe in your infallibility." Hence Punch's final advice: "If you cannot become wholly Roman or wholly Greek, set up for yourselves, but do not remain the ecclesiastical mermen you are at present."

The Purchas case was treated lightly at first in the lines on "The Dean and the Parson": —

DEAN OF RIPON TO PARSON PURCHAS

Dean (Sings) —

 
The Judges have spoken. Now don't be irascible:
Off with your Tunicle, Stole, Alb and Chasuble.
 

Parson P. (Sings) —

 
That's true, Mr. Dean, but they also declare
That a cope in Cathedrals all clergy must wear
On high days and Sundays —
 

Dean (Sings fortissimo) —

 
What me wear a cope!
On Sunday or Anyday
Go to the – Pope. (Exeunt in opposite directions.)
 

A Ritualist A B C

But Punch was seriously annoyed by the report of a meeting of Ritualists at which it was unanimously resolved to disobey the judgment of the Privy Council; and made no secret of his satisfaction when the Archbishop of Canterbury "turned down" the protest of 5,000 Anglicans headed by Pusey. A little earlier he had published an A B C for youthful Anglicans, showing a considerable knowledge of, but absolutely no respect for vestments. It may suffice to quote two entries: —

 
T is the Thurible, whose very smell
Incenses the people and makes them rebel.
 
 
Y is the Yeoman who now never enters
His old Parish Church, and has joined the Dissenters.
 

These jocularities, though not delicate, may pass. The worst examples of Punch's controversial zeal were prompted by the Confessional; and the worst of all is the set of verses headed, "A good sound Confession," describing how a priest was soundly horsewhipped and kicked downstairs by an irate husband who returned home to find his wife on her knees before her Confessor. The priest, be it added, unctuously professes to have enjoyed his flagellation as an exquisite mortification.

It is pleasant to turn from these exhibitions of virulent if honest antipathy to the treatment of those controversies in which freedom of thought was involved. Punch's earlier verses on Essays and Reviews, published in 1861, are more distinguished for their wisdom than their elegance of versification: —

A WORD OF ADVICE TO THE BISHOPS

 
Denounce Essayists and Reviewers,
Hang, quarter, gag them or shoot them —
Excellent plans – provided that
You first of all refute them.
 
 
By all means let the Hangman burn
Their awful book to ashes,
But don't expect to settle thus
Their heterodox hashes.
 
 
Some heresies are so ingrained
E'en burning won't remove them,
A shorter and an easier way,
You'll find it – to disprove them.
 
 
Be this, right reverends, your revenge,
For souls the best of cures,
Essay Essayists to upset
And to review Reviewers.
 

The long and ignoble campaign, as a result of which Jowett was for ten years deprived of the emoluments of his office as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, roused Punch in 1863 to a satiric and imaginary account of the proceedings in the "Small Debts and Heresies Court at Oxford."