[Illustration: TWELVE MONTHS AFTER MARRIAGE
"Bobby ought to love his pet for taking such care of his beautiful whiskers."]
[Illustration: TWENTY YEARS AFTER MARRIAGE
"My dear Bobby, you must let me pull it off your nose; it looks so ugly."]
By way of conclusion we may add that if _Punch_ reserved to himself the right of castigating the follies of his countrywomen, he was valorous in their defence when they were depreciated or caricatured by foreign critics or artists. In 1858 he falls foul of a German journalist, under the head of "British and German Beauty":--
The Berlin _Charivari_ contains the following humorous remarks on English beauty:--
"Each Nation thinks itself the handsomest in the world. We paint the devil black; the blacks will have him white. Miss Pastrano delights in her beard, and every Englishman thinks his red-haired, crooked-nosed, rabbit-toothed, goggle-eyed, loose-legged, calfless Dulcinea the very perfection of human beauty."
Not quite that. Not so perfect as the raven-haired, Grecian-nosed, white-and-sound-toothed, sloe-eyed, neat-legged young Teutonic lady, with such pretty little feet and ankles at the end of her legs. Of course the Prussian _Charivari's_ notion of an English girl is a bit of fun, complimentary irony; and we are sure our fair countrywomen will feel highly honoured by the mock-depreciation of our cousin German.
Much later on the French caricaturists, who habitually represented Englishwomen as lean, gaunt, ill-favoured and ill-dressed, and with long projecting teeth, roused him to protest with equal vigour against their gross and unseemly libels.
There is probably no better means of testing a man's literary sense than his estimate of poetry other than that written by authors of established reputation. And as with individuals so is it with papers. _Punch_ deserves no special credit for his devotion to Shakespeare, or for his ridicule of the Baconians who, in his phrase, sought to make the Swan of Avon a Goose. It is curious, however, in this context to note that, on _Punch's_ authority, Lord Palmerston suspended judgment on the question. In the arm-chair commentary on current events which appeared in 1865 under the heading, "_Punch's_ Table-Talk," we read:--