_Punch's_ reference to abusive personalities in the Press were no doubt justified, though (as we have seen in his comments on the Welsh Bards) they laid him open to the retort, "physician, heal thyself"; but his withers were unwrung when he assailed the _Saturday Review_ in 1858 for its frigid pedantry; or protested against the maudlin, devotional tone and mock impressiveness of fashionable clergymen; or the vulgar curiosity of snobs at bathing places. The futilities of garrison town life and the dangers which young ladies ran of being entrapped by seedy captains are exposed in the same year, to which also belongs a properly indignant remonstrance with the Lord Mayor of London for advising a thief to enlist in the army, a thoroughly characteristic example of the old middle-class prejudice against soldiers. The humours and trials of studio life play an increasing part in the pictorial side of _Punch_; they were derived largely, no doubt, from the experiences of his own artists, but the multiplication of these references serves to show the growing social importance of the artist; and the same remark, _mutatis mutandis_, applies to amateur theatricals. The allusions to club life are fewer than in earlier years, and are mainly concerned with the Athenæum. It is amusing to find the ancient legend of the alleged unsociability of the Athenæum referred to as far back as 1858. The Almanack for that year contains the following: "Imaginary Conversation--Anybody speaking to anybody at the Athenæum." As for Victorian society generally, it would be hard to find a more instructive sidelight on its usages than that furnished by _Punch's_ protest against "the Morning Call Nuisance":-- "Sir," said Dr. Johnson (or might have done so if he didn't), "the man who makes a morning call pays homage to a custom which the imbecile may bow to, but the sensible contemn." In the presence of his lady readers _Mr. Punch_ has not the courage to confess that he applauds the dictum of the doctor. If it were not for the practice of making morning calls, ladies often would be puzzled to know what on earth to do; and _Mr. Punch_ would not debar them from what is, after all, a harmless act of time-slaughter. But he protests with all his might against the notion which some ladies appear to entertain, that their husbands should attend them when they pay these morning visits. It is bad enough for husbands to be dragged to evening parties, but worse still is their suffering when they are cruelly compelled to make some morning call. [Sidenote: "_What is always Going On_"]