The moral feeling of the _Punch_ artists is so generally sound that it is surprising to find them often taking the wrong and popular side of the "conflict of ages" between mistress and maid. But if they usually laugh with the mistress and at the maid, they occasionally laugh with the maid and at the mistress; and truly the wildest absurdity attributed to the British servant seems venial compared with the thoughtless arrogance of the typical British mistress. _Punch_ does not wholly neglect her morals. Another hundred volumes or so will doubtless bring her over to Sydney Smith's opinion, that _all_ the virtues and graces are not to be had for seven pounds per annum. It was a happy retort upon "No Irish need apply," to present an English servant-girl peremptorily leaving a place because she had discovered that the family was Irish, alleging that her friends would never forgive her if they knew she had lived in an Irish family. The picture, too, is good of a pretty servant walking home in the evening behind an elderly and ill-favored lady to "protect" her from insult. _Punch_ wishes to know who is to protect the pretty girl on her return through London streets alone. We see also from numberless pictures that the British mistress deems it her right to control the dress of the British maid. When crinoline came in, she thought it impudent in a servant to wear it; but when crinoline went out, she deemed it no less presuming in her to lay it aside. For some years past the pictures of children and their ways by Mr. Du Maurier have been among the most pleasing efforts of comic art in England. There is not the faintest intimation in them of the malevolent or sarcastic. All good fathers, all good mothers, and all persons worthy to become such, delight in them. They are such pictures as we should naturally expect from an artist who was himself the happy father of a houseful of happy children, and who consequently looked upon all the children of the world in a fond, parental spirit. Surely no Bohemian, no hapless dweller in a boarding-house, no desolate frequenter of clubs, no one not sharing in the social life of his time, could so delightfully represent and minister to it. Du Maurier vindicates the generation that has produced Gavarni and Woodhull. He reminds us from week to week that children are the sufficient compensation of virtuous existence, worth all the rest of its honors and delights.