Punch (28.1855)

68

PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

ANOTHER SIT EROM THE MINING DISTRICTS.

“Martha, wast ’e done wi’ the Milk?”

“Geen it to the Shild.”

“Dang the Shild, thee should ha’ geen it to th’ Bull Pup!”

INVALUABLE HINTS TO NURSES
AND NURSEMAIDS.

Ir the darlings make a noise,

And a word or two don’t, stop ’em.

Pinch them if they’re girls, if boys,

Make no more ado but “whop” ’em.

Should the little dears resist.

When in suds too hot you dip ’em.

In their faces shake your fist,

If they dare to squall, then whip ’em.

When you comb their tangled hair.

Never mind their kicks and bawling,

You don’t feel it, tug and tear,

If they ’re cheeky, send ’em sprawling.

And should Missus rush up stairs.
Brighten’d by the horrid rumpus.

Say, you never saw such bears,

Thus to treat their poor nurse Bumtus.

Then, when Madam’s gone away.

If with vengeance you are foaming.

Just to shew who’s Missus, eh?

Give the cubs another combing.

If for three weeks by her cot,

Watching that cross peevish Minnie
Not a wink of sleep you’ve got,

Stand it longer—you’re a ninny.

All my eye the doctor’s stuff,

You’ve a dodge worth two on ’t, may be,
Poppy syrup’s cheap enough.

Bump must sleep as well as baby.

And if Minnie’s little hearse
Weeping neighbours soon set eyes on.
Who’ll suppose, with such a nurse,
Minnie died of taking pison ?

Education for the Army.

We are in a position to announce that arrange-
ments have been made with His Majesty the
Emperor of the Brench, for the admission of
all those Generals of the British army, whose
faculties are not impaired by age, as students at
the Ecole Poly technique.

I

JANET PRIDE.

Gentle reader, if you belong to, yet linger among a fast-disappear-
ing species, called the play-goer, go—leaving all other matters—go
straightway to the Adelphi, and see and hear Janet Pride. It is not
often that the ill-used British public has offered to it a drama of so
much bone and muscle, and such a big, beating heart in it. Shall we
tell you the story of Janet Pride? No, gentle public, we shall not.
That you shall have acted before you; that you shall jearn from the
players themselves, and not from the disenchanting quill—as it would
be on such occasion—of Punch. We think that the “learned gentle-
men” who, in the newspapers, hot from the playhouse, sit themselves
down, and industriously tell a plot like the plot of Janet Pride to the
breakfasting world, do a great wrong to that eccentric section of the
public—infatuated human creatures!—that still haunts the theatres.
Shall we tell the untimely end of that moral ragamuffin, Richard Pride, '
that picturesque tatterdemalion, as limned by Webster, who could
I represent any thing,from Macbeth to a reel in a bottle—we are sure he j
1 could dance a reel in a bottle ?—no ; not a word of it. Shall we go
through the story, the ups and downs, of the two Janets Pride, Janet |
the mother, and Janet the daughter, as both acted by Madame
Celeste ? Certainly not. Therefore the plot of the drama remains
for us untouched. We would as soon think of winding off a spider’s
web, wliereto the plot much assimilates, in its seeming complexity, but
in the simplicity and co-dependence of all its lines.

Richard Pride, in the person of Webster, will surely be recom-
pensed by a testimonial from the teetotallers. Glorious George
Cruiksiiank will make the design of a tea-urn, in gilt silver, to be
I presented to the Webster aforesaid, on the Adelphi stage in the j
| bosom of his sympathetic and admiring company (the apple-women,!

! the aproned Dryads, looking timidly on from the wings). We already i
see the classic face of George, and hear his clear and streaming!
speech ; for Janet Pride is, m fact, a. temperance play, without the
cant ot temperance. Pure lymph, and no leaden spouting of a pump. |

Richard is the victim of brandy: the man become a worm in a bottle.
But there is none of the sounding of the brass, nothing of the tinkling
of the cymbal in the story. If the evil come from the brandy cask,
there is no Mawworm nasally to drone from the tub. “Tell me, tell
me every night of my crime,” says Richard Pride to his loving,
withering Janet, “ it is better to fall to sleep with a mouth full of tears,
than a brain full of brandy.”

Richard Pride, fallen from a condition of trust and repute, lias forged
in England, and fled to Paris. And here we first see him—(we do not
reveal 1 he plot, nevertheless)—in all the dogged desperation of drink.
With most forceful truth does Webster give the yielding, melting
remorse, with the recurring vice—brandy coiling about his nature like
a snake. The desolate house of Richard Pride—the runaway, brandy-
soddened forger—tells a terrible story. Most terrible, but with a
sweet, deep pathetic beauty in the picture, is poor, patient Janet; the
pale monument—uncomplaining, too, as monumental stone—of her
husband’s guilt. Madame Celeste reveals all Ibis with affecting
truthfulness; there are no stage spasms : no foot-light feelings in the
matter; but all the sadness is rendered with the deep quietude of
patient, household suffering. Her self-sacrifice when compelled to give
her child to the Boundlmg—she recoils with horror from the opened
shutter, suddenly opening, and to her as mortally threatening as the
jaws of wild beast—the intense agony of the moment cutting the
heart-strings, and levelling her dead upon the snow, was given with a
reality that touched the heart of the audience into tears. Janet Pride
is stricken dead, and suddenly Richard, glaring at the corpse of his
wife, is in the grasp of justice.

And now we see Richard m the bush of Australia. His leg is freed
from the convict’s log, and he opens a firm with Black Jack, for
robbery, and any other casualty arising therefrom. (Let us, in our
way, give praise to Paul Bedford : his felony was very real: he was
hard and nigged; the mere image of a man, roughly carved from a
gibbet-tree.) Was it not her gracious Majesty who ordered Amburgh
to be painted among the dominated lions ? Surely a like patronage is