short
time I said--

"'Oh, sire, it is quite clear. The political European position is here
represented by a whist party, and your Majesty is represented apparently
as hesitating whether to continue the game.'

"It was a perplexing question, and I felt very much as Daniel may have
felt when called upon to explain 'Nebuchadnezzar's dream!'"

I was suggesting just now that to Cabinet Ministers the attitude of
_Punch_ is often a matter of very real concern--at least, that they seem
usually to have attached more importance to the matter than we who stand
outside would think to be reasonable; though, from a proper sense of the
ridiculous doubtless, Ministers have rarely turned upon _Punch_ to rend
him, for all they may have suffered at his hands.

There is a pretty story of Lord John Russell that is at once a charming
proof to the statesman's magnanimity and of the paper's influence. When
the excitement, already referred to, of the so-called "Papal Aggression"
was at its height, in consequence of the action of the Pope in creating
Roman Catholic Archbishops and Bishops with English territorial titles,
Lord John, who was then in power, took an active part in the House of
Commons on the side of the scaremongers, by introducing the
Ecclesiastical Titles Bill--in respect to which he was strenuously
opposed by both Bright and Cobden--not in order to put repressive
measures into force against the Catholics, he assured the House, but
simply "to insist upon our ascendency." Or, as he explained in 1874,
"The object of that Bill was merely to _assert_ the supremacy of the
Crown. It was never intended to prosecute. Accordingly, a very clever
artist represented me, in a caricature, as a boy who had chalked up 'No
Popery' upon a wall[17] and then ran away. This was a very fair joke....
When my object had been gained, I had no objection to the repeal of the
Bill." This gave Leech his chance, and he executed his famous cartoon of
'No Popery!' (March 22nd, 1851), which was among the greatest popular
successes ever published by _Punch_--even his smart young rival, the
"Man in the Moon," declaring that _Punch_ had with his cut "wakened up
those whom his letterpress had sent to sleep."

In his Reminiscences the Rev. William Rogers, Rector of St. Botolph's,
Bishopsgate, tells the delightful sequel. When he called on Lord John,
the Minister began to talk about the Charterhouse. "He said that he had
lost his interest in the latter since his