ollower" in the kitchen; and he perversely refuses to see how it can
be right for Miss Julia to listen to the soft nonsense of Captain
Augustus Fitzroy in the drawing-room, and entirely wrong for Molly, the
nursery-maid, to blush at the blunt admiration of the policeman, talking
to her down the area. Punch is independent and original in this respect.
His strange creed seems to be, that human nature _is_ human
nature,--whether, in its feminine department, you robe it in silk or
calico, and, in its male department, button a red coat over the breast
of an officer of the Guards, or put the coarse jerkin on the broad back
of the industrious toilsman. And according to this whimsical belief, he
writes and talks jocosely, but with covert common sense. His warm and
catholic humanity runs up and down the whole social scale with a
clear-sighted equity. His philanthropy is what the word literally
signifies,--the love of man as man, and because he is a man. Without
being an impracticable fanatic, advocating impossible theories, or
theories that can grow into realities only with the gradual progress of
the race,--without indulging in fanciful visions of unapproached
Utopias,--without imagining that all, wherever born and however
nurtured, can reach the same level of wealth and station,--he holds, not
merely that

"Honor and shame from no condition rise,"

but also, be the condition high or low, the worthy occupant of it, by
reason of the common humanity he shares with all above and all beneath
and all around him, has a brother's birthright to brotherly treatment,
to even-handed justice and open-handed charity.

We have taken it for granted that Punch is a household necessity and
familiar friend of our readers; and, resisting as far as possible the
besetting temptation to refer in detail to the many pictorial and
letter-press illustrations of his merits, have spoken of him as "a
representative man,"--the universally acknowledged example of the
legitimate and beneficent uses of the sportive faculties; thus
indirectly claiming for these faculties more than toleration.

The variety in human nature must somehow be brought into unity, and its
diversified, strongly contrasted elements shown to be parts of a
symmetrical and harmonious whole. The philosophy, the religion, which
overlooks or condemns any of these elements, is never satisfactory, and
fails to win sincere belief, because of its felt incompleteness. All men
have an instin