The Atlantic Monthly, page 139 by Various Authors
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the East, because she did not echo their sectarian shibboleths, and would not ask whether a good nurse were Protestant or Romanist.
We may repeat, therefore, as a prime excellence of Punch, that he is the maker of mirth for the million. He is mainly engaged in furnishing titillating amusement,--and he furnishes an article, not only marketable, but necessary. All work makes Jack a dull boy,--and not infrequently an unhappy, if not bad boy,--whether Jack be in the pulpit, the counting-room, the senate-house, or digging potatoes; and what is true of Jack is equally true of Gill, his sister, sweetheart, or wife. That Punch every week puts a girdle of smiles round the earth, interrupts the serious business of thousands by his merry visits, and with his ludicrous presence delights the drawing-room, cheers the study, and causes side-shakings in the kitchen,--entitles him to be called a missionary of good. Grant this,--then allow, on the average, five minutes of merriment to each reader of each issue of Punch,--then multiply these 5 minutes by--say 50,000, and this again by 52 weeks, and this, finally, by 17 years, and thus cipher out, if you have a tolerably capacious imagination, the amount of happiness which has flowed and spread, like a river of gladness, through the world, from that inexhaustible, bubbling, and sparkling fountain, at 85, Fleet Street, London.
Punch is the advocate of true manliness. Velvet robes and gilded coronets go for nothing with him, if not worn by muscular integrity; and fustian is cloth-of-gold, in his eyes, when it covers a stout heart in the right place. He has no mercy on snobbism, flunkeyism, or dandyism. He whips smartly the ignoble-noble fops of the household-troops,--parading them on toy-horses, and making them, with suicidal irony, deplore the hardships of comrades in the Crimea. He sneers at the loungers, and the delicate, dissipated roués of the club-house,--though their names were once worn by renowned ancestors, and are in the peerage. Fast young men