I’ll sing you a fine old song, improved by a modern pate, Of a fine Old English Gentleman, who owns a large estate, But pays the labourers on it a very shabby rate. Some seven shillings each a week for early work and late, Gives this fine Old English Gentleman, one of the present time. Nor did _Punch_ shrink from looking a good deal higher than the fine Old English Gentleman for his victims. He had a special, almost a Lloyd Georgian, taste for baiting dukes. He attacked the Duke of Norfolk with admirable irony for suggesting to the poor that they should eke out their miserable fare by using curry powder. He made butts in turn of the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of Sutherland, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Atholl. He did not spare even the Duke of Wellington. “The old Duke,” he declared, “should no longer block up the great thoroughfare of civilisation--he should be quietly and respectfully eliminated.” It was in the same mood that the Marquis of Londonderry was denounced both as a tyrannical coal-owner and an enemy of the Queen’s English--“the most noble, but not the most grammatical Marquis.” _Punch’s_ view of the House of Lords is expressed with considerable directness in his scheme for reforming the Chamber, which begins: It is an indisputable truth that there can be no such thing as a born legislator. As unquestionable is the fact that there may be a born ass. But your born ass may be born to your legislator’s office, and command a seat in the house of legislators by inheritance, as in not a few examples, wherein the coronet hides not the donkey’s ears. This is not particularly brilliant. It is interesting not so much in itself as because it is the sort of thing with which _Punch_ used regularly to regale its readers. _Punch_ in those days was a paper with a purpose. Its humour, like Dickens’s was to a certain extent a missionary humour. _Punch_ saw himself as the rescuer of the underdog, and, if he could not achieve his object comically, he was prepared to do it angrily. He did not hesitate to fling his cap and bells rudely in the face of royalty itself. He might be accused of vulgarity, but not of being, as he has since become, the more or less complacent advocate of Toby, the top-dog.