Punch (39.1860)

j September 15, 1860.J PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. 101

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WHAT IT MUST HAVE COME TO, IF THE RAIN HAD CONTINUED MUCH LONGER !

“ IS THEBE ANY SPEBBITS PBESENT ? ”

To the Editor of punch.

“Sir,

“See what you have brought upon yourself by deriding and
■denying the wonderful facts of Spiritualism ! Read the subjoined
.paragraph concerning you, extracted from the ‘Notices to Corre-
spondents ’ in the Spiritual Magazine :—

“ Inquirer.—* A Word with Punch on the merits of his three Puppets, SleeJchead,
'Wronghead, and Thickhead/ is, we believe, out of print. The exposures in it were
• certaiuly very damaging, but they answered the purpose. Punch never attacked
-Mr. Bunn afterwards; perhaps the quiet intimation on the corner of the title-page,

* To be continued if necessary,’ made Punch discreet rather than valiant. You are
'right in supposing that * Thickhead' is the present Editor of Punch."

“Besides deterring youfromsayingany thing more against Spiritualism,
the foregoing reference to yourself ought to convince you of its truth.
:Surely you must see that the passage above quoted is a communication
from the spirit of the late Barnard Gregory, sometime Editor of the
Satirist.' Expeet more, and worse, from the same quarter, if you keep
■on making jests of Mediums and talking tables. Your ridicule of
■quackery will be met with personal abuse, the author of which you may
•call a dirty blackguard, but you will disdain to answer him, and he will
go^about boasting that, he has shut you up.

“The ribaldry with which you assail Spiritualism is nothing new.
It is as old as Spiritualism itself. The Spiritualist and the Scoffer have
■co-existed from the beginning. . Let me call your attention to evidence
•of this fact, contained in some lines of doggerel (much like the verses
of your own contributors), witli which an insidious naturalism, from
time immemorial, has sought to poison and prejudice the mind of
infancy

“ High diddle diddle,

The Cat and the Fiddle,

The Cow jumped over the Moon ;

The Little Dog laughed to see such sport:

And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.”

(Let us analyse.these despicable nursery rhymes, in order to expose
'their covert meaning. ‘High diddle diddle.’ This first line is com-
monly, but erroneously, supposed to be nonsense. It embodies a
•general denunciation of Spiritualism as delusion. ‘ High ’ means

supreme; ‘diddle’ is a familiar synonym of imposture or humbug
The repetition of the word ‘ diddle ’ is intended to intensify the force
of it, so that ‘diddle diddle’ is as much as to say ‘humbug double
distilled,’ or ‘transcendent humbug.’ The whole line amounts to a
sweeping assertion that Spiritualism is regular out-and-out humbug.

“ I shall make this statement clear as we proceed. ‘The Cat and
the Fiddle.’ This is ribaldry. It is just the same sort of ribaldry as
that with which you attack the high and holy truths of Spiritualism.
The words are intended to insinuate deception in the case of &
spiritual performance on a violin. The fiddle was played by spirit
agency; but the poetaster attempts to account for a phenomenon
which he cannot deny by suggesting that the sounds were produced bj
a cat, that twitched the strings of the instrument with her claws unde*
the table.

“ ‘ The Cow jumped over the Moon.’ More ribaldry. As much as
to say, the alleged fact of spirit-fiddling is as improbable as the
legendary relation that a certain ruminant quadruped overleapt the
satellite of this plauet.

“‘The little Dog laughed to see such sport.’ Ribaldry again. Of
course a dog could not laugh; though the so-called laughing hyena is
a brute of the dog kind, and such puppies as your Toby may laugh at
humble women for inquiring, in the unaffected language of the lower
classes, whether there is any sperrits present ? By the sport mentioned
in this line are intended Spiritual manifestations; and the pretended
laughter of the little dog is an innuendo, signifying that they were so
monstrously absurd as even to excite the derisive merriment of an
animal of the canine species.

“ We.now come to the last of the five lines which compose this piece
of stupid scurrility. * And the Dish ran away with the Spoon.’ This
is the simple statement of an unquestionable Spiritual fact, which the
preceding buffoonery is calculated to discredit.

“You will live to believe in Spiritualism, if you live till you are a
day older—as Dr. Lardner lived to see the Atlantic crossed by
steamers. Spirits will, of course, immediately disclose the authors of
the Road and Stepney murders. You have put them on their mettle
by defying them to reveal anything whatever, and, though in eternity,
they will lose no time in rapping out the names of the murderers by
the alphabet.

“Is there no sperrits—to borrow the homely language of commu-