Punch: Punch (21.1851)

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

53

THE INCOME AND EXPENDITURE OF THE
RIGHT REVEREND DR. PUNCH.

If I were a Bishop with from £5,000 to £28,000 a year, I would soon
silence any remarks that might be made about the largeness of my
income. In whatever ignorance I allowed one of my hands to remain
as to the actions of the other, I would take care that the Public, at
least, should be acquainted with the operations of both. I would—or
my name is not Punch.

At present, a single hand only of a Bishop is seen at work. Every-
body beholds his right pocketing money: nobody perceives his left
disposing of the cash.

Consequently, an opinion has become prevalent that out of upwards
of £20,000, perhaps, of yearly revenue, the greater portion is expended
on the appetites, desires, propensities, and affections of the episcopal
individual. A good deal of it, having first been transmuted into fluid
and solid aliments of a luxurious nature, is supposed to be converted
bodily into Bishop. Some part is estimated to be spread over
the surface of the prelate in the form of canonicals. It is reckoned
that the carriage runs away with another share. Not a little, it is
surmised, is turned into ribbons, silks, satins, lace, and other articles of
attire or ornament, investing or decorating the Bishopess, and the
other females of the Right Reverend family. A considerable portion is
suspected to be absorbed by the collegiate education and accompanying
indulgences of his Lordship's eldest son, or is conjectured to be more
legitimately laid out in the purchase of a commission, or in procuring a
post, for another of his offspring. And a handsome remainder is
imagined to be deposited at the banker's. The world cannot well
conceive how so much money can be kicked down except by yachting,
betting, driving four-in-hand coaches, keeping a stud and a pack of
hounds, or undertaking the management of an opera-house. People
know that the Bishop could never get rid of it by using any degree of
hospitality, unless he were continually giving Lord Mayor's dinners and
Champagne suppers. They do not reflect that the establishment of a
Bishop is not quite so splendid as that of a Sultan, and that the whole
Episcopal Bench, however large consumers of good things, would
probably be found to weigh less than an equal number of distressed
farmers.

Now, then, if I were a Bishop, the low-minded world—which never
dreams of the possibility of such a thing as devoting riches to bene-
ficence—should know how my money went. I should not care about
being accused of parading my charity. My object would be to vindicate
the character of my order. I would publish a book that should confute
Horsman, confound the politics of Sir Benjamin Hall, and scatter
all our enemies. That book would create a deeper sensation than any
publication that I know of has excited of late years. Therein should
be revealed the butchers' and bakers' bills I had paid for feeding the
hungry, the tailors' demands that I had settled for clothing the naked,
and all the various expenses I had gone to in scattering plenty over a
smiling diocese, and making wives and children happy. It should
be manifest that I was only the almoner of my see; merely a con-
duit for the distribution of its revenues, and that of the stream of
opulence that passed through my hands, very little indeed stuck to my
fingers.

This most interesting publication, in short, should be a Bishop's
Account Book—a work showing, in the most satisfactory manner, how
I relieved myself of the encumbrance of my wealth. Whether or no I
required any farther relief from that burden, it would be for the nation
to judge.

HANGING ON TO THE EXHIBITION.

We notice that several tradesmen have adopted the trick of hanging
on to the Exhibition. They could not command admission by their
own talents, so they endeavour to hang on to the building by the
aid of some little miserable falsehood. They pin these falsehoods
on to the corners of their shawls, or let them dangle fancifully
from the ribbons of their bonnets. They print them in brave bold
letters on the pieces of pasteboard that give the public the novel
information that such and such a Visite is " Chaste," or that the pea-
green Pardessus, which is opening its arms in the most affectionate
manner the whole breadth of the window, as if it wanted to embrace
the earliest opportunity of meeting with a purchaser, is " Quite the
Rage."

These fashionable announcements abound mostly in Leicester Street
—the late Cranbourn Alley—and in all the ticketing-shops along
Oxford Street and Holborn. One fact, printed in large vermillion
letters, at least the thickness of a red-hot poker, made us quite start
again. It revealed to us the important secret that a Beaver Bonnet,
big enough to be the coal-scuttle that feeds the fire of the Palm-house
at Kew, was "Worn by Her Majesty at the EXHIBITION • " the

latter word being large enough to be read by a short-sighted man
without spectacles from the opposite side of the way. Further on, a
Coiffeur de Paris intimated to us, through the mouthpiece of a pink
label, that a beautiful brown Wig was " Selected by Prince Albert
at the EXHIBITION "—the largeness of the latter word being such as
would have done no discredit to one of Jullien's monster posters.
The wig was curly, and beautifully full—and well it may have been, ffi
only to cover the baldness of a story on so large a head. We were
next stopped in Holborn to admire a Shawl, the pattern of which must
have been taken from a lobster salad, and which a printed card
informed us was " Too Late for the Exhibition ;" meaning, we
suppose, that some one had attempted to wear it on the opening day,
but had been so stared, and laughed, and hooted at by all the little
boys, that the lady, venturesome as she was, had been obliged to
turn back, and so the Shawl had arrived " Too Late for the Ex-
hibition."

These are not half the tricks with which tradesmen dress up their
ugly goods, only the dressing does not make them look any the
prettier. One bold genius has drawn a sort of landscape in
teeth, which gives you the toothache to look at. Underneath it is
written, " The Original in the Exhibition." We have not seen it
—nor do we wish to, particularly—but we imagine the view must be
in Tus(k)cany. ' Another genius has displayed a Fire-Extinguishers
which is described as being " In Use at the Exhibition." Now,
as we have never heard of the Crystal Palace catching fire, we cannot
understand how the instrument in question can exactly be "inUse at
the Exhibition." Probably a part of the Exhibition is set on fire
regularly every day to prove the superior merits of this wonderful
" Fire-Extinguisher." Perhaps it is kept in close attendance upon the
Koh-i-noor, upon the authority of scientific men that the Diamond is
"a combustible body." If so, we can account for there being so
little fire in the Koh-i-Noor. The fact is, the "Fire-Extinguisher " has
completely put it out.

So various are the schemes for hanging on to the Exhibition, that
we expect to see Mrs. Graham's balloon announced to make an
ascent under the title of " The only Balloon that has been up in
the Exhibition."

THE CROWN AND THE MITRE.

" There's a divinity doth hedge a king." Touching and beautiful is
the practical recognition of this truth by the Bishop op Gloucester.
With a loyalty, whose source is in the breeches pocket, the Bishop
renews a lease "for three lives; " and it is erroneously given out, that
these lives are the youngest lives of the Bishop's own family. Not so;.
the Bishop, with an affecting devotion towards the Crown, chooses
"the lives of three infant children of the royal family ! " A family-
says Mr. Horsman—"notoriously one of the longest-lived in this-
country." Surely, there is an ungenerous insinuation conveyed in this
remark ; a worldly-mindedness that smacks of the profane layman. If
the Bishop selected three of the royal children in preference to any of
his own olive branches, it was from no unseemly calculation of com-
parative longevity; but solely from a wish to vindicate to a stiff-necked
generation, the necessary connexion of the Crown and the Mitre in all
tilings : from no remote desire to endow the weekly prayer for the
long life of the royal family—a prayer put up in all pulpits—with a
monetary interest; but solely to prove the loyalty of the churchman in
the devotion of the lessor. There was once a Bishop who said to a
King, " Sire, you are the breath of our nostrils :" now the Bishop of
Gloucester proves, in a manner, what the by-gone Bishop declared:
for three of the Royal Children, by the conditions of the lease aforesaid,
are literally made the breath of the nostrils of the lessee. In them, he
lives, and moves, and has his being.

Were it possible there could be a condition of pagan society, in
which leases were granted not for a term of human lives, but of lives
of irrational animals, it is not unlikely that some astute bonze would
measure the duration of his leases by the lives of three tortoises,
"notoriously of the longest-lived in his country." Nay, if an old
Egyptian priest, he might take three lives of three of his sacred cats—
in all, seven-and-twenty lives;—but then, such astuteness would betray
the benighted selfishness of the infidel. How different the operation
of what the profane know as personal interest, in the serener soul of
the Christian accountant ?

Nil Admirari.

We really feel called on to admire a young gentleman, who, when
examined on a trial, the other day, about a " lark " at Oxford, deponed of
himself thus—

" Am 21. Am nothing."

This is decidedly ingenuous. It seems difficult to say what will
become of the youth, if it be true that ex nihilo, nihil fit.