There was little fooling here. His
warning was serious and solemn; he followed every act of the great drama
with breathless interest and with unsurpassed power of apprehension and
pictorial demonstration; and his sympathy for the misfortunes of "la
grande nation," and his horror at the terrors of the Commune, did not
prevent his pity going forth to the broken leader who had played and
lost, and who returned to England in a plight far sadder and more
desperate than that in which he had lived his Bohemian life thirty years
before.

In considering _Punch's_ attitude during his long career, it must be
borne in mind that he has always aimed at representing the sentiments of
the better part of the country--seeing with London's eyes, and judging
by London standards. _Punch_ is an Englishman of intense patriotism, but
primarily a Citizen of London, and a far truer incarnation of it--for
all his chaff of aldermen and turtle--than the Lord Mayor and Chairman
of the County Council put together. "But the aspects under which either
British lion, Gallic eagle, or Russian bear have been regarded by our
contemplative serial," says Ruskin, in a passage which to some extent
bears out this contention, "are unfortunately dependent on the fact that
all his three great designers (Tenniel, Leech, and du Maurier) are, in
the most narrow sense, London citizens. I have said that every great man
belongs not only to his own city, but to his own village. The artists of
_Punch_ have no village to belong to; the street-corner is the face of
the whole earth, and the only two quarters of the heavenly horizon are
the east and west--End." Especially did _Punch_ represent English
feeling during the great reforms of the 'Forties and 'Fifties. Of course
he made mistakes, and many of them. "He who never made a mistake never
made anything." He ground the No-Popery organ; he defended the
Ecclesiastical Titles Act; he ridiculed the Jewish Disabilities Bill; he
fostered the idea of relentless vengeance on the Indian mutineers and
rebels, and bitterly opposed Lord Canning's more humane policy;[12] he
issued cartoons during the Secession War--to use the words of Mr. Henry
James--"under an evil star;" he aimed poisoned shafts at Louis Philippe;
he scoffed, at first, at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and seriously
retarded its progress; he failed to appreciate Lord Aberdeen's
statesmanship, like the rest of his contemporaries, during the Crimean
War; he joked at Tur