COUNTRY FOOTMAN: "Pray, Sir, what do you think of our town? A nice place, ain't it?" LONDON FOOTMAN (condescendingly): "Vell, Joseph, I likes your town well enough. It's clean; your streets are hairy; and you've lots of rewins. But I don't like your champagne; its all Gewsberry."] [Illustration: THE GREAT SOCIAL EVIL Time: Midnight. A sketch not a hundred miles from the Haymarket. BELLA: "Ah! Fanny! How long have you been _Gay_?"] [Illustration: A FRESHENER ON THE DOWNS] THE LIBERAL PROFESSIONS As a mirror of public opinion on the status and importance of the learned and liberal professions _Punch_, when due allowance has been made for his limitations, his prejudices and even his passions, cannot be overlooked by the student of social history. A whole book has been written on his attitude towards the Church; in another section of this chronicle I have dealt at some length with his hostility to Pluralism, Sabbatarianism, Ritualism, and endeavoured to show how a generally tolerant and "hang theology" attitude was in the early 'fifties exchanged for one of fierce anti-Vaticanism. The "No Popery" drum was banged with great fury, and when the Roman Catholic hierarchy was re-established in England in 1850, _Punch_ supported the Ecclesiastical Titles Act which declared the assumption of titles connected with places in the realm illegal and imposed heavy penalties on the persons assuming them. This Act, passed in 1851, remained a dead letter until 1871, when it was repealed. As for the law and lawyers the record of _Punch_ is more consistent and creditable, and, as we have seen, he was from the first an unflinching advocate of cheap justice and the removal of irregularities which pressed hardest on the poor, an unrelenting critic of barbarous and oppressive penalties. No one was too great or small to escape his legal pillory, or to secure recognition for reforming zeal or humane administration--from Lord Brougham and Lord St. Leonards down to unpaid magistrates. To what has been said elsewhere it may be added that the series of papers written by Gilbert à Beckett, under the heading of "The Comic Blackstone," are much better than their title, for they contain a good deal of shrewd satire and sound sense. _Punch_ had good reason to be proud of his own legal representative, the humane and genial Gilbert à Beckett. He welcomed Talfourd's promotion to the Bench as an honour to letters, for Talfourd was not only the executor and first biographer of Lamb and the author of the highly successful, but now forgotten, tragedy of _Ion_, but his services to authors in connexion with copyright earned for him the dedication of _Pickwick_. On his death in 1854, _Punch's_ elegy fittingly commemorated the character and career of one of whom, as an advocate, it was said that the wrong side seldom cared to hear him, and who, like Hood, in his last words, deplored the mutual estrangement of classes in English society.