Mr. Lindsay himself can whoop like a whale. He is a poet in search of superlatives beyond the superlatives. He cannot find them, but he at least articulates new sounds. As one reads him, one is reminded at times of a child in a railway-train singing and shouting against the noise of the engine and the wheels. The world affects Mr. Lindsay as the railway-train affects some children. He is intoxicated by the rhythm of the machinery. As a result, though he is often an ethical poet, he is seldom a spiritual poet. That helps to explain why his verse does not achieve any but a sentimental effect in his andante movements. As his voice falls, his inspiration falls. In “The Santa Fé Trail” he breaks in on the frenzy of a thousand motors with the still, small voice of the bird called the Rachel Jane. He undoubtedly moves us by the way in which he does this; but he moves us much as a sentimental singer at a ballad concert can do. It is not for passages of this kind that one reads him. His words at their best do not minister at the altar: they dance to the music of the syncopated orchestra. That is Mr. Lindsay’s peculiar gift. It would hardly be using too strong a word to say that it is his genius. IX MR. PUNCH TAKES THE WRONG TURNING There are those who gibe at _Punch_. There are also those who gibe at those who gibe at _Punch_. The match is a fairly even one. _Punch_ is undoubtedly not as good as it used to be, but it is not quite so certain that it is not as clever as it used to be. Very few people realise that _Punch_ was once a good paper--that it was a good paper, I mean in the Charles-Kingsley sense of the adjective. It began in 1841, as Mr. C. L. Graves prettily says, by “being violently and vituperatively on the side of the angels.” If _Punch_ had kept pace with the times it would, in these days, at the age of eighty, be suspected of Socialism. Its championship of the poor against those who prospered on the poverty of the poor was as vehement as a Labour speech at a street-corner. One of the features of the early _Punch_ was a “Pauper’s Corner,” in which “the cry of the people found frequent and touching utterance.” It was in the Christmas number of _Punch_ in 1843 that Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” was first published. Mark Lemon, the editor, insisted on publishing it, though all his colleagues were opposed to him on the point. In the following years we find the same indignant sense of realities expressing itself in Leech’s cartoon, “The Home of the Rick Burner,” which emphasised the fact that the cause of an outburst of incendiarism in Suffolk was the greed of the farmers who underpaid their labourers. _Punch_ also took up the cause of the sweated labourers in verse: