the
throne, and had recently entered into happy wedded life, Louis Napoleon
was living a life in London not at all upon the Imperial plan; Senorita
de Montijo, the future Empress, was a young lady of small expectations
in Spain--the daughter of the Comtesse de Montijo, of the Kirkpatrick
family; and the Emperor William, who was destined in the fulness of time
to crush them both, was a political star of at most the fourth
magnitude. Bismarck, Gladstone, and Disraeli were names already known to
the public--Mr. Disraeli, indeed, being of those who took part in the
debate the result of which was to turn out Lord Melbourne's Government
(August, 1841) and send in Sir Robert Peel's, in which Mr. Gladstone
took his place as Vice-President of the Board of Trade and Master of the
Mint. But, like _Punch_, they were but beginning life; Mr. Gladstone was
a Tory and High Churchman; Free Trade and the Corn Law Repeal were as
questions hardly yet "acute;" and neither Bright nor Cobden had entered
the House of Commons. _Punch_, therefore, entered the field at an
interesting moment, and began by boldly proclaiming his impartiality:

"POLITICS.--'PUNCH' has no party prejudices--he is conservative in
his opposition to Fantoccini and political puppets, but a
progressive Whig in his love of _small change_."

When Disraeli, equally with his rival, changed his party, the fact was
recorded in a happy parody of Hood's well-known verses:--

"Young Ben he was a nice young man,
An author by his trade,
He fell in love with Poly Tics,
And soon an M.P. made.
He was a Rad-ical one day,
He met a Tory crew,
His Poly Tics he cast away,
And then turned Tory too."

Soon he was leader of the little "Young England Party," and was to be
seen in _Punch's_ cartoon as a viper gnawing at the "old file," Sir
Robert Peel. Then came the triumph of Free Trade, duly celebrated by
John Leech in one of his most light-hearted cartoons.

The fatal year of 1848 opened with the memorable letter of the Prince de
Joinville, at that time a young man of thirty, which set half Europe
looking to their national defences, but which pretended to be aimed only
at an invasion of England. There was, of course, a scare, not to say a
panic, in official circles; but _Punch_ was one of the few who kept
their heads, making capital galore out of the situation. He never tired
of deriding the fiery young prince, who was only too glad a little later