nor sycophancy, but from an anxious
desire to be entirely just and good-natured, and to avoid coarseness or
breach of taste.

Much of the change in _Punch_ has simply been the inevitable
accompaniment of change in the times--in the tastes, manners, social
polish, and sensitive feelings of the courteous and urbane. It is so
easy to be strong in the sense in which an onion is strong; but _Punch_
has long since cast away that kind of force. Many and many a time an
admirable "subject" for a cartoon has been rejected--pointed,
picturesque, or droll, as the case may be--because some one has raised
the question, "But would that be quite fair?" Jerrold was bitterly
caustic and sometimes neither just nor merciful in his Quixotic tilting
at upper-class windmills; and Leech, in his earlier work, was often
fiercely drastic. But there was more democratic outspokenness, more
middle-class downrightness, and less of the Constitutional Club and
drawing-room element in those ante-du Maurier days. But men and artists
alter, and become moulded and modified by their environments, and it may
safely be said that there is to-day no effort on _Punch's_ part to be
"smart," anti-popular, anti-bourgeois, or anti-anything, save
anti-virulent and anti-vulgar.

In no department of public affairs has _Punch_ shown greater advance
than in that of the public Faith. _Punch_ the Religionist--I use the
expression in all seriousness--while sturdily maintaining his own
ground, and as the representative of "the great Protestant middle-class"
swiftly denouncing the slightest show of sacerdotalism, has displayed an
increasing tolerance and liberal-mindedness that were not his most
notable characteristics in his youthful days. High Church and Low,
bishops and clergy, Protestant and Catholic, from the Pope to Mr.
Spurgeon, have all at times come under his lash.

Mr. Punch has ever kept his eye attentively on the affairs of the
Church. In his first volume he supported the agitation against the
old-fashioned, high-panelled, curtained pew, at the same time cordially
endorsing the Temperance movement of the young Irish priest, Father
Mathew. The cause of the curate he has always upheld with a zeal that
has betrayed him on more than one occasion into injustice to the
bishops; wherein he has erred in company with his fellow-sage, the Sage
of Coniston. And the cause of the poor man, up to the point of Sunday
opening of museums and picture galleries, has always been a