Punch, or the London Charivari, page 39 by Various Authors
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ions reproduced himself on either on or off a camel. On less personal grounds, I have no scruple in giving him the remaining five for the vastly interesting facts, political, international, social and racial, with which he entertained me. It requires no small skill in a dispenser of such facts to make them entertaining. Twice only was I minded to quarrel with him; once when he expressed a general contempt, based upon one egregious example, for the foreign exports of Oxford and Cambridge, and again when he got on to the subject of tourists, who include my nearest and dearest, and abused them from the standpoint of a "visitor." In the first case he was absurd, in the second, common-place; but he made ample compensation for both by his memorable chapter of "Conclusions," in which he gave me clearly to understand why East, being East, will never be joined to West, always West, but yet how the twain have got within measurable distance of one another.
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There must have been moments when NAPOLEON found St. Helena a little quiet for a man of his temperament; when the monotony of his life there pressed somewhat hardly upon him. On these occasions I like to think of him saying philosophically to himself, as he remembered what Mr. RUDOLF PICKTHALL calls "the last phase but two," "Well, after all, this isn't Elba. I've got that much to be thankful for." In The Comic Kingdom (LANE) Mr. PICKTHALL shows how everybody on the island struggles to make a bit out of their visitors. Little children rallied round with posies of wild flowers, demanding large sums in payment. Bogus monks waved crosses at him, and, if he pretended not to notice them, rolled in the dust under his carriage wheels. There was never a moment when somebody was not calling with a bust of the Emperor or Empress, price three hundred francs. And itinerant bands played under his windows into the small hours of the morning. I can imagine him saying, in the words of ORESTES, "Dis is a dam country." ORESTES was the guide who conducted