From cutting continual capers Ev'n Kaisers must sometimes refrain; But _you're_ never out of the papers-- Corelli and Caine.
At the time of the Boer war poets had been vociferously active. By 1904 a "slump" had set in; and in an interview Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head, had declared that verse had ceased to be remunerative. Embroidering this text _Punch_ traced the cause to the material self-indulgence of the public. People dined too well to want to read rhymes, and poets wanted better pay:--
And this is why no bards occur. None ever knows that aching void, That hunger, prompting like a spur, Which former genii enjoyed; For all the poets dead and gone, Whose Muse contrived to melt the nation, Habitually did it on A regimen of strict starvation.
But if verse was at a discount, new forms of prose were emerging, and the spasmodic discourses of Mr. Bart Kennedy in the _Daily Mail_ moved _Punch_ to parody what he considered to be a variant on Walt Whitman, in which sentences were reduced to a minimum and verbs were dispensed with altogether. Another new writer to whom _Punch_ now paid the homage of parody was Mr. Chesterton, whose glittering paradoxes are travestied in a mock eulogy of _Bradshaw_, in the manner of "G. K. C.'s" book on Dickens. Bradshaw is praised for his splendid consistency, his adherence to fact, his uniform excellence of style and freedom from extraneous matter. Moreover, he is a great teacher:--
The last and deepest lesson of Bradshaw is that we must be in time. No man can miss a train and miss a train only. He misses more than that. A man who misses a train misses an opportunity. It is probably the reason of the terrific worldly success of Cæsar and Charlemagne that neither of them ever missed a train.
Reviews of books, chiefly novels, became a regular feature of each week's issue in the latter half of this period, and it would be impossible to deal fully with _Punch's_ critical activities. As an example of the frank handling of a bad book it would be hard to improve on the notice of a novel which appeared in 1906: "Anyone who wants to read a vulgar book in praise of vicious vulgarians should read----, by--------. All others are counselled to avoid it."