as much a wonder as it is now a jest....

"As on the stage of PUNCH'S theatre many characters appear to fill
up the interstices of the more important story, so our pages will
be interspersed with trifles that have no other object than the
moment's approbation--an end which will never be sought for at the
expense of others, beyond the evanescent smile of a harmless
satire."

A portion of this programme was duly eliminated by the abolition of the
Fleet and the Marshalsea; and it must be admitted that _Punch_ has long
since forgotten his declared crusade against capital punishment. But he
has been otherwise busy. His sympathy for the poor, the starving, the
ill-housed, and the oppressed; for the ill-paid curate and the
worse-paid clerk; for the sempstress, the governess, the shop-girl, has
been with him not only a religion, but a passion. Professor Ruskin,
judging only by _Punch's_ pictures, and that a little narrowly, has
thought otherwise. _Punch_ "has never in a single instance," says he in
his "Art of England," "endeavoured to represent the beauty of the poor.
On the contrary, his witness to their degradation, as inevitable
consequences of their London life, is constant and, for the most part,
contemptuous."

Truth to tell, _Punch_ has been kindly from the first; and a man of
mettle, too. None has been too exalted or too powerful for attack;
withal, his assaults, in comparison with those of his scurrilous
contemporaries, have been moderate and gentlemanly in tone. He has
attacked abuses from the highest to the lowest. Sham gentility, vulgar
ostentation, crazes and fads, linked aestheticism long drawn out, foolish
costume, silly affectations of fashion in compliment and language--all
have been set up as targets for his shafts of ridicule or scorn. He has
been a moral reformer and a disinterested critic. A liberal-minded
patriot, he has ever opposed the advocacy of "Little Peddlington" in
Imperial politics; and municipal maladministration is a perennial
subject for his denunciations. He has been a kindly cauteriser of social
sores; caustic, but rarely vindictive. Spiritualism, Socialism,
Ibsenism, Walt Whitmania--all the movements and sensations of the day,
social, political, and artistic, in so far as they are follies--have
been shot at as they rose. And having conquered his position, _Punch_
has known how to retain it. "The clown," says Oliver Wendell Holmes,
"knows his place to be at