Punch (68.1875)

April 24, 1875.]

PUNCH, OP THE LONDON CHARIVARI.

175

drops shaken off the Lion’s mane, through the columns of the
Englishman, oyer his Honourable fellow-Members. Here are a
few of these bright particular stars :—“Dirty dogs,” “fitter tenants
fora pigstye, than the House of Commons.” “Low mongrels,” “ at
their drunken dinner-tables, surrounded by persons as drunk, or
ignorant, or foolish as themselves, or in their counting-houses,
where they concoct the frauds by which ships are lost, and sailors are
drowned, and insurance-offices pillaged, and creditors defrauded.”
It has been well observed by a contemporary that when the House
is calling printers of newspapers to its bar, it should not forget
that the Editor of the Englishman has a seat on its benches.

In the end, the House having refused to receive the Petition by
391 to 11, Sir Stafford Northcote got the languid attention of the
thinnest House that ever listened to a Budget Speech to the emptiest
Budget ever brought forward—whereof the sense and substance is—
in effect—

No Surplus;

No Taxes to be taken off ;

No'Taxes to be put on.

No Surplus, we say, for what is £600,000 surplus on an income of
.£75,000,000 but only not a deficit ? And what is £60,000 Licence-
duty taken off the little Brewers, but only not absolute statu quo of
taxation ?

Having nothing to say about the Budget proper, Sir Stafford
occupied his two hours and a half by developing a plan for paying
off the National Debt. He proposes that, from two years hence,
£28,000,000 shall be annually devoted to the Debt. By this means,
he calculates that, in thirty years, with the little helps of casual
surpluses and terminable annuities, as at present, we may extin-
guish £213,000,000 of debt! Sanguine Sir Stafford ! All Punch
can say is, May Sir Stafford live to see it, and may Punch be
there to clap him on the shoulder !

Friday.—

Alas, when Tom; Thumb brought his Giants to Bar,

The House had resolved Tommy’s triumph to mar,

So it snubbed the small hero, and cut his cock’s comb,

And it said to the Giants—“ You’d better go home.

It was all a mistake ; what we wished you to tell,

We can get at without you, we find, fust as well.”

The Kenealy Slush-pot has boiled over at last. Forced to the
wall by Colored Loyd-Lindsay, Mr. Cross, Mr. Bright, Mr.
Macdonald, and Mr. Waddy, the Lion tried to frighten the House
by a,n awful hint of what would come, if, after he had made his
Motion, the House negatived it. Of course, if the House wasn’t
frightened, he wasn’t—only don’t let the House say he, the Lion,
had not warned it. Meanwhile the House still stands, and so does
Colonel Loyd-Lindsay’s Motion to expunge Dr. Kenealy’s notice
from the journals on Monday—pending expunction of more of the
Doctor than his motion.

IF NOT LEANDER.

oyton the buoyant may not quite have made
Boulogne from Dover,

But we own his venture a sober one, now
we’ve seen him half-seas over.

If he can’t exactly buoy a ton, he at least
has proved he can buoy
Three hundred pounds, for fifteen hours,
gay, if not as a sand -, as a man-buoy.

The “silver streak” may well feel small,
now it no longer able is
To keep up its reputation as “ cequor dis-
sociabil^s,,,

With Hawkshaw under-tunnelling, and
Bessemer and Dicey

Swing - salooning and twin-shipping o’er
that anything but nice sea.

But we had thought, spite of tunnel, and
swinging-saloon and twin-ship,

The Channel would have laughed to scorn a mere india-rubber-skin -
ship,

Knocked the wind out of its water-proof, made stop-cocks unavail-
ing,

Nor, the wearer once in, let him out, for any amount of baling.

So no wonder if, like Her Majesty, Punch felt a little nervous.
When Boyton took his leap in the dark, in the Channel Sea
protervous,

And at starting, from the paddles of the night-tide Dover packet,
Had. a narrow escape of having a hole knocked in his air-tight
jacket.

He was warned ’gainst the Warne tide-way by each Pilot that that
way knows ;

The French coast was sure, in derision, to stick Scorn’s thumb to
its Grey-nose;

The breakers would smash his air-cells in, the currents old gooseberry
playing,

With his sails and paddles, would toss him up, like a drowned rat,
some distant bay in,

But he would go in, if not over; and like Foreign-Loan-Stock high-
quoted,

Was duly inflated, rigged, sent out, and for many hours really
floated,

Till when it grew dark, and the pilot declined the Captain longer
to lie by,

He was hauled, willy-nilly, aboard the tug, stripped, rubbed down,
and put to bye-bye.

Then bravo to Boyton’s fifteen hours float, and the gallantry that
nerved it!

If he hasn’t quite achieved success, he has done more, quite
deserved it.

And may his next essay—if there’s a next—at trans-Channel
floatation,

Find kinder tides, and more qualified guides to pilot the navigation.

The first day Punch has nothing to do, we will put on the apparatus,

And though more used to blowing, than being blown, up, will let
Captain B. inflate us ;

And if the wind keep the water out, and the rocking our brains
don’t addle,

Not a la Macgregor our own canoe, but our own Punchy person
we ’ll paddle,

And let ourselves be tossed—not in a blanket, but on the billow;

With air for fur about our coat, air for feathers in our pillow ;

And if we must go to sea, it shall be with a Boyton dress our trunk

in,

Though we trust we shall ne’er have to try it on, a shipwreck’s serious
funk in.

A Primitive Race.

It is pleasant to see that the Members of our Learned _ Societies
take an interest in the affairs of the humbler ranks of their fellow-
creatures. Only this last week, at the Anthropological Institute, a
paper was read “ On the People of the Long Barrow Period.”
Surely there can be no difficulty in identifying these people with
the costermongers we see (and hear) to this day in our streets.

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I Hindoo Digest.—Curry and Mulligatawny—Institutes of Menu.