Pilot of many Pilgrims since the shout "Mark twain!"--that serves you for a deathless sign-- On Mississippi's waterway rang out Over the plummet's line--
Still where the countless ripples laugh above The blue of halcyon seas long may you keep Your course unbroken, buoyed upon a love Ten thousand fathoms deep!
Some three years later came _Punch's_ "_Ave, atque Vale_," when Mark Twain died in April, 1910:--
Farewell the gentle spirit, strong to hold Two sister lands beneath its laughter's spell! Farewell the courage and the heart of gold! Hail and Farewell!
To complete these American references I may add that _Punch_ in 1907 made great play out of the letter addressed by an American "Clippings Agency" to Petrarch, offering to send him press-cuttings of his works. But America has no monopoly of these solecisms. Fourteen years later, when the Phoenix Society revived _The Maid's Tragedy_, a similar offer was made by a London press-cutting agency to "John Fletcher, Esq." and "--Beaumont, Esq."
Already in the early 'nineties the altered status of journalism and the journalist had leapt to the eyes of _Punch_, who himself was in a sense born and bred in the "Street of Ink." I pass over his ironical disapproval of the _St. James's Gazette_ when that journal, in October, 1892, "sincerely hoped that there was no truth in the rumour that a paper for children will shortly make its appearance, entirely written and illustrated by children under fifteen years of age." The project never materialized, but its spirit has been translated into action by the literary enterprise of our modern _enfants terribles_. The adult journalist in the 'nineties was not to suffer from this unfair competition for a good many years to come. Meanwhile he could at least congratulate himself that he was better housed and paid: it was not until 1904 that the "wisdom of the East" began to interfere with his freedom as a war correspondent.
JAPANESE OFFICER (to Press Correspondent): "Abjectly we desire to distinguish honourable newspaper man by honourable badge."]
In 1897 _Punch_ illustrated the change by parallel pictures of the journalist in 1837, writing in a squalid room in the Fleet Prison, and in the year of the Diamond Jubilee, seated in a sumptuously equipped office, fat and prosperous, and smoking a large cigar. In the previous year _Punch_ had saluted the _Daily News_ on the attainment of its jubilee. The connexion was an old and intimate one, for the publishers of _Punch_ had been the first publishers of the _Daily News_, and it had been renewed in the 'nineties when Sir Henry Lucy ("Toby," of _Punch_) for a while occupied the chair in which Dickens had sat. A far more momentous event, however, was associated with the year 1896--the founding of the _Daily Mail_ by Mr. Alfred Harmsworth, subsequently described by one of _Punch's_ writers as "the arch-tarantulator of our times." He was certainly, if unintentionally, invaluable to _Punch_, and even more stimulating than Mr. Caine and Miss Corelli. By 1900 his genius for discovering a constant succession of scapegoats, and converting the idol of yesterday into the Aunt Sally of to-day, is handsomely acknowledged in the lines "Ad Aluredum Damnodignum." Then it was Sir Michael Hicks-Beach and Mr. Balfour, but _Punch_ foresaw that the habit was inveterate:--