DOI Heft:
September 28, 1867
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.16880#0141
September 28, 1867. j PUNCH OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. 129
FENIANISM AND HEMP.
{To Mr. Punch.)
Sir,
It is too probable that the Eenians will find that they have
provided Mr. Calcraft with a job at Manchester. Otherwise, that
officer will have only to sigh and say “ Calcraft’s occupation’s
gone !” No murderer, however atrocious, can hereafter be hanged, if
traitors convicted of murdering a policeman in the discharge of his
duty escape the gallows. Mr. Calcraft had, some time ago, to
exonerate this world of a whole batch of murderous pirates. There
must be henceforth an end to such exoneration, unless the world is
in like manner to be exonerated of equally murderous Eenians, without
limitation as to number ; so that Mr. Calcraft, unless he is going to
be pensioned off without a successor, may confidently reckon on a job
which will be tolerably extensive.
Treason, unattended with the circumstance of murder, in these
dominions, will never, perhaps, bring a neck within a noose. Perhaps,
I say, for there is no knowing what may not result from repeated pro-
vocation. It may be true that the Eenian convicts now undergoing
penal servitude for their own part wish that they had been hanged.
It may be satisfactory to some loyal but vindictive minds to reflect that
if those rascals had suffered death, they would not at present be suf-
fering something worse. But the sufferings of penal servitude are in a
great measure inoperative, because unseen. When a villain is disposed
of by Mr. Calcraft, there he is, aloft, visibly in an unpleasant
osition. A Eenian in such a position would be a caution to Eenians,
ecause they could see him. Imagination is requisite to enable them
to apprehend the unpleasantness, which they do not see, endured by a
Fenian experiencing prison discipline and convict labour. It may,
therefore, possibly become a necessity, until Eenianism shall have been
effectually discouraged, to put every Eenian we can catch to the
purpose of a scarecrow.
Well, Sir; but then you make the brute a martyr, and so you would,
to some extent, literally hang Eenians to encourage the others. Now
then, Mr. Punch, for the suppression of Eenianism, suppose you em-
ploy hemp in its secondary form as I may say, otherwise than in that
of a slip-knot, and than in the place of a cravat. What if you made it
into whipcord, ninefold and knotted, and got Calcraft, or in prefer-
ence a younger and a stronger man, to apply it to a region somewhat
below the nape, in such wise as it is wont to be applied for the remu-
neration of garotters ?
Dogged treasonable ruffianism, equally with dogged felonious ruf-
fianism, would receive its deserts in the infliction usually allotted to
bad dogs. In the presence of reporters, up to their business, a Eenian
traitor, demonstrative of sensations excited by the cat-o’-nine-tails,
would serve to afford a sufficiently intelligible warning to his con-
federates at large. The Irish-American Fenian, under those circum-
stances, would utter a most exemplary, and also a most musical, if
most melancholy, Irish-American howl.
I am, Sir, playfully yours,
Tickletoby.
GOOD NEWS FOR BAD WRITERS.
It is surprising what discoveries are made in the dead season. Here
is one for instance, the account of which has recently been snipped out
by the scissors of many a sub-editor:—
“ Writing Superseded. —Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a type-
writing machine, lately exhibited to the London Society of Arts, which is said to
print a man’s thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process.
By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonised
paper, which is moved by the same manipulation.”
Every author his own printer ! What a happy state of things ! No
more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens : no more
labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work
will be in future merely play—on the piano. The future Locke may
write his essays by a touch upon the keys.
In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will
stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice
the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able
to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to
compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be
invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease
before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever
may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds
of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or
reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry,
or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit
down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a
week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper,
and issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopaedia
complete within a month.
“DID NEWTON DISCOVER GRAVITY ? ”
(I quote, in sorrow, the heading of an article in an Evening Journal.)
Did he, Mr. Punch? If so, then am I no longer proud of the prefixes
to my surname, for generations the distinction of our scientific family,
a collateral ancestor having met Sir Isaac at dinner, and helped him
to marrow pudding. Nay, I regret the feeling of reverential awe, as
of a pilgrim who has travelled far to worship some saintly tibia, with
which I stole into the gallery at South Kensington, and beheld the
effigies of the great philosopher (as I then deemed him); and thought
of the manorhouse at Woolsthorpe, and the schoolboy’s name cut in
Grantham Grammar School, and the apple-tree, and dog Diamond, and
the tobacco-stopper, and the pebbles on the sea-shore, and Pope’s
couplet, and everything else I could recollect about my illustrious
namesake to tell to that incomparable Fanny Thoroton, then under
my charge and escort in the Exhibition. “Discover gravity” for-
sooth ! Why was he not content with his Principia, and his Fluxions,
and his Knighthood, and his Royal Society, and Mastership of the
Mint, without being the cause to an anxious posterity of long faces,
and serious looks, and excellent advice, and Income-Tax assessments,
and cold dinners, and early hours, and accounts rendered twice a year,
and domestic servants changed once a quarter, and everything else
that is disagreeable, and synonymous with gravity ? Imagine what a
cheery world it must have been to live in before this much over-rated
Mathematician (as I am now constrained to think him) patented his
disastrous discovery! “A mad world, my masters;” “Cakes and
ale; ” “ Sport that wrinkled care derides, and laughter holding both
its sides ; ” High Jinks; the conversion of night into day; no
National Debt, no Congresses, no Reform Banquets, no cheap Sherries,
no Vestries, _no sitting for your photograph, no Comic Periodicals,
nothing but Punch and long whist, and hot suppers, and top-boots,
and post-chaises, and Gretna Green, and breakfast in bed, and general
jollity and unlimited credit. He deserve statues, and monuments,
and epitaphs, and new editions, and treasurings-up of leaves from
the conceited apple-tree, and sentimental pictures about the destructive
spaniel and the delicate tobacco-stopper ! He, the man who discovered
—gravity ! Rather let these honours be paid to the founders and
inventors of pantomimes, and double acrostics, and meerschaums, aud
croquet, and matches that ignite only on the box, and a thousand other
accessories to the due enjoyment of life. But I will not believe that
it was Newton who brought this misery on his species. I will comfort
myself with thinking that it was Pascal, or William the Silent, or
Aristides the Just, or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or Zim-
mermann, or the founders of the sect called Quakers, or perhaps the
Middlesex Registrars; and until I am convinced to the contrary by
evidence such only as a Court of Justice would accept, I shall forbear
advertising that I have abandoned the name of which I am still so
proud, and continue to subscribe myself, Isaac Newton Bacon.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING IN THE CITY.
Sigh no more, dealers, sigh no more,
Shares were unstable ever,
They often have been down before,
At high rates constant never.
Then sigh not so,
Soon up they ’ll go,
And you ’ll be blithe and funny.
Converting all your notes of woe
Into hey, money, money.
Write no more letters, write no mo
Ou stocks so dull and heavy.
At times on ’Change ’tis always so,
When bears a tribute levy.
Then sigh not so,
And don’t be low.
In sunshine you ’ll make honey,
Converting all your notes of woe
Into hey, money, money.
The Rule of the River,
(As Deduced from a late Collision.)
The rule of the river’s a mystery quite,
Other craft when you ’re steering among,
If you starboard your helm, you ain’t sure you are right.
If you port, you may prove to be wrong.
a clashing of pans.
It is said that some ten Bishops of the Established Church will be
absent from the Pan-Anglican Synod. Perhaps they are occupied with
private pans of their own. Peradventure they have other fish to fry.
Vol. 53.
FENIANISM AND HEMP.
{To Mr. Punch.)
Sir,
It is too probable that the Eenians will find that they have
provided Mr. Calcraft with a job at Manchester. Otherwise, that
officer will have only to sigh and say “ Calcraft’s occupation’s
gone !” No murderer, however atrocious, can hereafter be hanged, if
traitors convicted of murdering a policeman in the discharge of his
duty escape the gallows. Mr. Calcraft had, some time ago, to
exonerate this world of a whole batch of murderous pirates. There
must be henceforth an end to such exoneration, unless the world is
in like manner to be exonerated of equally murderous Eenians, without
limitation as to number ; so that Mr. Calcraft, unless he is going to
be pensioned off without a successor, may confidently reckon on a job
which will be tolerably extensive.
Treason, unattended with the circumstance of murder, in these
dominions, will never, perhaps, bring a neck within a noose. Perhaps,
I say, for there is no knowing what may not result from repeated pro-
vocation. It may be true that the Eenian convicts now undergoing
penal servitude for their own part wish that they had been hanged.
It may be satisfactory to some loyal but vindictive minds to reflect that
if those rascals had suffered death, they would not at present be suf-
fering something worse. But the sufferings of penal servitude are in a
great measure inoperative, because unseen. When a villain is disposed
of by Mr. Calcraft, there he is, aloft, visibly in an unpleasant
osition. A Eenian in such a position would be a caution to Eenians,
ecause they could see him. Imagination is requisite to enable them
to apprehend the unpleasantness, which they do not see, endured by a
Fenian experiencing prison discipline and convict labour. It may,
therefore, possibly become a necessity, until Eenianism shall have been
effectually discouraged, to put every Eenian we can catch to the
purpose of a scarecrow.
Well, Sir; but then you make the brute a martyr, and so you would,
to some extent, literally hang Eenians to encourage the others. Now
then, Mr. Punch, for the suppression of Eenianism, suppose you em-
ploy hemp in its secondary form as I may say, otherwise than in that
of a slip-knot, and than in the place of a cravat. What if you made it
into whipcord, ninefold and knotted, and got Calcraft, or in prefer-
ence a younger and a stronger man, to apply it to a region somewhat
below the nape, in such wise as it is wont to be applied for the remu-
neration of garotters ?
Dogged treasonable ruffianism, equally with dogged felonious ruf-
fianism, would receive its deserts in the infliction usually allotted to
bad dogs. In the presence of reporters, up to their business, a Eenian
traitor, demonstrative of sensations excited by the cat-o’-nine-tails,
would serve to afford a sufficiently intelligible warning to his con-
federates at large. The Irish-American Fenian, under those circum-
stances, would utter a most exemplary, and also a most musical, if
most melancholy, Irish-American howl.
I am, Sir, playfully yours,
Tickletoby.
GOOD NEWS FOR BAD WRITERS.
It is surprising what discoveries are made in the dead season. Here
is one for instance, the account of which has recently been snipped out
by the scissors of many a sub-editor:—
“ Writing Superseded. —Mr. Pratt, of Alabama, is the inventor of a type-
writing machine, lately exhibited to the London Society of Arts, which is said to
print a man’s thoughts twice as fast as he can write them with the present process.
By a sort of piano arrangement the letters are brought in contact with carbonised
paper, which is moved by the same manipulation.”
Every author his own printer ! What a happy state of things ! No
more struggles to write legibly with nibless tavern-pens : no more
labour in deciphering the hieroglyphs of hasty writers. Literary work
will be in future merely play—on the piano. The future Locke may
write his essays by a touch upon the keys.
In this inventive age there really is no saying where discovery will
stop. Now that authors are to put their thoughts in print with twice
the pace that they can write them, perhaps ere long they will be able
to put their works in type without so much as taking the trouble to
compose them. A thought-hatching easy chair may very likely be
invented, by the help of which an author may sit down at his ease
before his thought-printing piano, and play away ad libitum whatever
may occur to him. Different cushions may be used for different kinds
of composition, some stuffed with serious thoughts, fit for sermons or
reviews, and others with light fancies, fit for works of fiction, poetry,
or fun. By a judicious choice of cushions an author will be able to sit
down to his piano, and play a novel in three volumes twice or thrice a
week, besides knocking off a leader every morning for a newspaper,
and issuing every fortnight a bulky epic poem, or a whole encyclopaedia
complete within a month.
“DID NEWTON DISCOVER GRAVITY ? ”
(I quote, in sorrow, the heading of an article in an Evening Journal.)
Did he, Mr. Punch? If so, then am I no longer proud of the prefixes
to my surname, for generations the distinction of our scientific family,
a collateral ancestor having met Sir Isaac at dinner, and helped him
to marrow pudding. Nay, I regret the feeling of reverential awe, as
of a pilgrim who has travelled far to worship some saintly tibia, with
which I stole into the gallery at South Kensington, and beheld the
effigies of the great philosopher (as I then deemed him); and thought
of the manorhouse at Woolsthorpe, and the schoolboy’s name cut in
Grantham Grammar School, and the apple-tree, and dog Diamond, and
the tobacco-stopper, and the pebbles on the sea-shore, and Pope’s
couplet, and everything else I could recollect about my illustrious
namesake to tell to that incomparable Fanny Thoroton, then under
my charge and escort in the Exhibition. “Discover gravity” for-
sooth ! Why was he not content with his Principia, and his Fluxions,
and his Knighthood, and his Royal Society, and Mastership of the
Mint, without being the cause to an anxious posterity of long faces,
and serious looks, and excellent advice, and Income-Tax assessments,
and cold dinners, and early hours, and accounts rendered twice a year,
and domestic servants changed once a quarter, and everything else
that is disagreeable, and synonymous with gravity ? Imagine what a
cheery world it must have been to live in before this much over-rated
Mathematician (as I am now constrained to think him) patented his
disastrous discovery! “A mad world, my masters;” “Cakes and
ale; ” “ Sport that wrinkled care derides, and laughter holding both
its sides ; ” High Jinks; the conversion of night into day; no
National Debt, no Congresses, no Reform Banquets, no cheap Sherries,
no Vestries, _no sitting for your photograph, no Comic Periodicals,
nothing but Punch and long whist, and hot suppers, and top-boots,
and post-chaises, and Gretna Green, and breakfast in bed, and general
jollity and unlimited credit. He deserve statues, and monuments,
and epitaphs, and new editions, and treasurings-up of leaves from
the conceited apple-tree, and sentimental pictures about the destructive
spaniel and the delicate tobacco-stopper ! He, the man who discovered
—gravity ! Rather let these honours be paid to the founders and
inventors of pantomimes, and double acrostics, and meerschaums, aud
croquet, and matches that ignite only on the box, and a thousand other
accessories to the due enjoyment of life. But I will not believe that
it was Newton who brought this misery on his species. I will comfort
myself with thinking that it was Pascal, or William the Silent, or
Aristides the Just, or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, or Zim-
mermann, or the founders of the sect called Quakers, or perhaps the
Middlesex Registrars; and until I am convinced to the contrary by
evidence such only as a Court of Justice would accept, I shall forbear
advertising that I have abandoned the name of which I am still so
proud, and continue to subscribe myself, Isaac Newton Bacon.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING IN THE CITY.
Sigh no more, dealers, sigh no more,
Shares were unstable ever,
They often have been down before,
At high rates constant never.
Then sigh not so,
Soon up they ’ll go,
And you ’ll be blithe and funny.
Converting all your notes of woe
Into hey, money, money.
Write no more letters, write no mo
Ou stocks so dull and heavy.
At times on ’Change ’tis always so,
When bears a tribute levy.
Then sigh not so,
And don’t be low.
In sunshine you ’ll make honey,
Converting all your notes of woe
Into hey, money, money.
The Rule of the River,
(As Deduced from a late Collision.)
The rule of the river’s a mystery quite,
Other craft when you ’re steering among,
If you starboard your helm, you ain’t sure you are right.
If you port, you may prove to be wrong.
a clashing of pans.
It is said that some ten Bishops of the Established Church will be
absent from the Pan-Anglican Synod. Perhaps they are occupied with
private pans of their own. Peradventure they have other fish to fry.
Vol. 53.