Though in the golden days of Gladstonian finance the income tax came down to 4d. and even 3d. in the pound, the standard of living rose, and £500 a year is mentioned in 1867 as a possible basis for matrimony. From whatever the cause--possibly the prevalence of large families had something to say to it--the rapidity with which married people of both sexes grew old, as compared with the juvenile grandparents of to-day, is strikingly illustrated in the pages of _Punch._ Take for example the two pictures "Twelve months after Marriage" and "Twenty years after Marriage" in 1862. When we take into account the earlier age at which people married sixty years ago, the couple in the picture on p. 265 need no be more than forty-five; yet they both look at least seventy. One is reminded of a passage in _Sense and Sensibility_ (though, that, of course, was fifty years earlier), in which John Dashwood, speaking of his mother, who is "hardly forty," suggests that "she may live another fifteen years." The pictures given here represent a happy marriage. _Punch_ had no panacea for unhappy marriages; but he remained of the same opinion, so often expressed in his earlier days, that a cheap Divorce Act was a better cure than the punishment of cruel wife-beaters. And throughout this period he remained constant in his support of the campaign for the amendment of the Women's Property Acts, on the lines of his summary of Lord Brougham's three resolutions moved in the House of Lords on February 13, 1857. They were "First, that their present rights were all wrongs. Second, that a woman was entitled to her own property; and third, that if our ridiculous theory of marriage prevented a woman from having this justice, at all events a profligate husband should be restrained from wasting her possessions." Lastly, he remained unshaken in his adhesion to the cause of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, or, as he termed it, "the Bill for Emancipation of Sisters-in-Law from the tyrannical disqualification which prevents their taking the matrimonial oath when elected by a Briton and a widower." [Illustration: TWELVE MONTHS AFTER MARRIAGE "Bobby ought to love his pet for taking such care of his beautiful whiskers."] [Illustration: TWENTY YEARS AFTER MARRIAGE "My dear Bobby, you must let me pull it off your nose; it looks so ugly."] [Sidenote: _The English Feminine Type_] By way of conclusion we may add that if _Punch_ reserved to himself the right of castigating the follies of his countrywomen, he was valorous in their defence when they were depreciated or caricatured by foreign critics or artists. In 1858 he falls foul of a German journalist, under the head of "British and German Beauty":-- The Berlin _Charivari_ contains the following humorous remarks on English beauty:--