ets of London was realised forty years later. The great "Missing
Word Competition" of 1892 was forestalled by _Punch_ by four-and-thirty
years (p. 53, Vol. XXXV., August 7th, 1858). Leech's "Mistress of the
Hounds," too--how fantastic the idea was thought in those days, and
laughed at accordingly!--has since become a hard, astraddle,
uncompromising fact; and the lady's safety riding-skirt, that attached
itself to the saddle when the lady lost her seat, anticipated by thirty
years the patent for a similar contrivance taken out in 1884. Indeed,
_Punch's_ picture of November, 1854, was put in as evidence before Mr.
Justice Wright in April, 1893, when an action between two sartorial
artists turned upon the point of anteriority, and the picture won the
case.

Common-sense, and shrewdness of observation and judgment, which are at
the root of amateur prophecy, brought as much honour to _Punch_ as ever
Old Moore obtained through one of his lucky flukes. In December, 1893,
the Prince of Wales opened the Hugh Myddleton Board School, the finest
in London, which had been erected on the site of the old Clerkenwell
prison; and on the invitation card to the ceremony appeared a
reproduction of the _Punch_ picture of May, 1847, which accompanied an
altercation between "School and Prison, who've lately risen As
opposition teachers." This was published nearly a quarter of a century
before Mr. Forster's Education Act, and concludes with the prophecy
curiously fulfilled in the case of this particular institution. To this
picture, in which the county gaol, untenanted, looks scowlingly at the
crowded school, the Prince feelingly referred when he spoke of the
scepticism with which the statement was regarded, that the institution
of "free" schools would shut the prisons up. But a volume might be
filled with instances of the occasions on which _Punch_ has seen with
his eyes, and thought with the front of his brain--how his demands for
necessary innovations (such, for example, as fever carriages in 1861)
were quickly acted upon, and how his serious mood has enforced the
respect which mere geniality might have failed to secure.

He is not, of course, entitled to invariable congratulation for his
attitude towards art; but he has suffered as well as acted ill. When he
derided the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and joined in the storm of
ridicule that swirled round the heads of Rossetti and his devoted and
courageous friends, he doubtless acted within