to leave the world without a farewell gibe and a
laugh, for Wit knows no mercy.

Another main charge laid at _Punch's_ door is that he is too little like
Hogarth in the past, too little like French satirists in the present.
Thackeray's proud boast that the paper had never said aught that could
cause a girl's cheek to mantle with a blush,[26] is acknowledged by the
naturalist and realist of the day as the severest condemnation that
could be brought against it. "We do not want in _Punch_ a moral paper
_virginibus puerisque_," says M. Arsene Alexandre, in effect, in his
important work "L'Art du Rire;" "_Punch_ is _un peu trop gentleman_.
What we want is to be enlightened." But _Punch_ has not chosen to cast
the beams of his search-light on to that side of "life" which is turned
towards vice; and if he determines that the _liaisons_ and all the
attendant world of humour that afford inspiration to the talent of the
Grevins, the Forains, the Guillaumes, and the Willettes of France, are
outside his field of treatment, who shall blame him? If there is any
moral at all to be gleaned from the work of the _Punch_ caricaturists,
it is argued, it is the never-ending sermon, though the sermon is a
humorous one, of the non-existence of immorality. Perhaps; but _Punch_
does not aspire to reflect the savagery we call civilisation by painting
a Hogarthian "Progress," nor to preach virtue by depicting vice. It is
no doubt very appalling and amusing to hear a young girl-cynic say, as
she points to a hideous monkey in a zoological gardens--"He only wants a
little money to be just like a man!" _Ca donne a penser_; but _Punch_
prefers wholesome jests to irony and repellent cynicism, and is content
to leave his impeachment in the hands of his spice-loving detractors,
even at the risk of being reminded year by year that "Gentle Dulness
ever loves a joke."

Another fruitful source of adverse criticism is an occasional slip on
_Punch's_ part in respect to some point of fact. Then at once half a
dozen papers are on his track with an eagerness that suggests the idea
that they were lying in wait. First come the matters of detail, as when
the "Athenaeum" (January, 1877) justifiably complained that the popular
conception of the imperial crown of the Empress of India as a
four-arched structure, like that of Germany, is due to the mistake of
_Punch_, "whose artists are always falling into this error in their
cartoons of the Empress of India." In 1879