The cartoon, The "Silent Highway"-Man, was published in 1858, but it is, perhaps, the best of the many pictorial comments on the above text. The noisome state of the Serpentine--"a lake of mere manure"--constantly affronted _Punch's_ sensitive nose. Insanitary Smithfield and squalid Covent Garden elicit dishonourable mention from the early 'forties onward. But it was in 1849, the year of the cholera and typhus visitation, that his crusade against London filth--"Plague, Pestilence and Co."--began in earnest. The evil is traced to the triple source of bad drainage, overcrowded intramural burial grounds, and the unchecked pollution of the river. _Punch_ salutes Mr. G. A. Walker, the author of "Gatherings from Graveyards," as a public benefactor for his zeal in endeavouring to secure the abolition of intramural interments, and tilts savagely at obstructive Boards of Guardians, vestry clerks, and extortionate undertakers, who profited by the maintenance of the abuse. He gives us an "Elegy written in a London Churchyard," on a victim of an epidemic brought on by preventable dirt; he exhibits "the water that John drinks"; he represents Hamlet soliloquizing in a London graveyard; and in 1849 he suggests the revision of street nomenclature in accordance with official acquiescence in the then existing dominion of dirt. Though by no means an enthusiastic admirer of the Duke of Wellington, _Punch_ confesses that he would like to see him appointed Sanitary Dictator. The Thames, with its "acres of cesspool," is likened to "a fetid Dead Sea." Yet _Punch_ refused to lay the blame at the door of Lord John Russell or the Government, who were held guilty by the _Morning Herald_ for the twelve thousand deaths from cholera in London. The real criminals were to be found elsewhere. The ravages of typhus and cholera in 1849 have been surpassed in recent years by those of influenza, but the toll was heavy, and heaviest among the poor:-- For three sad months Britannia mourned her children night and day, For three sad months she strove in vain the pestilence to stay; Medicine, helpless, groped and guessed, and tried all arts to save, But the dead carried with them their secret to the grave. Death sat at the gaunt weaver's side, the while he plied the loom; Death turned the wasting grinder's wheel, as he earn'd his bread and doom; Death, by the wan shirtmaker, plied the fingers to the bone; Death rocked the infant's cradle, and with opium hushed its moan. [Illustration: THE POOR CHILD'S NURSE] [Sidenote: _King Cholera's Friends_]