her a good nurse were Protestant or Romanist.

We may repeat, therefore, as a prime excellence of Punch, that he is the
maker of mirth for the million. He is mainly engaged in furnishing
titillating amusement,--and he furnishes an article, not only
marketable, but necessary. All work makes Jack a dull boy,--and not
infrequently an unhappy, if not bad boy,--whether Jack be in the pulpit,
the counting-room, the senate-house, or digging potatoes; and what is
true of Jack is equally true of Gill, his sister, sweetheart, or wife.
That Punch every week puts a girdle of smiles round the earth,
interrupts the serious business of thousands by his merry visits, and
with his ludicrous presence delights the drawing-room, cheers the study,
and causes side-shakings in the kitchen,--entitles him to be called a
missionary of good. Grant this,--then allow, on the average, five
minutes of merriment to each reader of each issue of Punch,--then
multiply these 5 minutes by--say 50,000, and this again by 52 weeks, and
this, finally, by 17 years, and thus cipher out, if you have a tolerably
capacious imagination, the amount of happiness which has flowed and
spread, like a river of gladness, through the world, from that
inexhaustible, bubbling, and sparkling fountain, at 85, Fleet Street,
London.

Punch is the advocate of true manliness. Velvet robes and gilded
coronets go for nothing with him, if not worn by muscular integrity; and
fustian is cloth-of-gold, in his eyes, when it covers a stout heart in
the right place. He has no mercy on snobbism, flunkeyism, or dandyism.
He whips smartly the ignoble-noble fops of the
household-troops,--parading them on toy-horses, and making them, with
suicidal irony, deplore the hardships of comrades in the Crimea. He
sneers at the loungers, and the delicate, dissipated _roues_ of the
club-house,--though their names were once worn by renowned ancestors,
and are in the peerage. Fast young men are to him befooled prodigals,
wasting the wealth of life in profitless living. He is not, however, an
anchorite, or hard upon youth. On the contrary, he is an indulgent old
fellow, and too sagacious to expect the wisdom of age from those
sporting their freedom-suits. Still, he has no patience with the foppery
whose whole existence advertises fine clothes, patronizes taverns,
saunters along fashionable promenades, and ogles opera-dancers. In this
connection, his hits at "the rising generation" will be called to mind.
P