In extending a welcome to Kingsley's[26] _Water Babies_, and later on to _Alice in Wonderland_, our friend _Punch_ did no more than might have been expected of him. But his praise of the former story is pitched in a pretty high key: the author of the "Table Talk" in 1865 declaring that he "would rather have written the _Water Babies_ than any book in the last fifty years." In the controversy that raged over _Poems and Ballads_, in 1866, _Punch_ committed himself truculently to the side of the angels of decorum. In consequence he writes pungently, that "having read Mr. Swinburne's defence of his prurient poetics, _Punch_ hereby gives him his royal licence to change his name to what is evidently its true form--"Swine-born." Name-twisting, with a view to casting odium on an antagonist, is an old but dangerous game. The most that can be said in _Punch's_ defence, which is not much, is that he was not the only offender. In the acrimonious pamphlet warfare that raged between Swinburne and Dr. Halliwell Phillipps, the latter called the poet "Pigsbrook," and the poet retorted by referring to his opponent as "Hell-P." Apart from this error of taste, _Punch_ had at least the support of powerful and distinguished allies in his condemnation. But he overdid his disparagement when four years later he observed that "certain Songs before Sunrise are promised us ere long, from the pen of a young poet." Nor was the allusion to Walt Whitman as "an impostor" in 1869 any happier than his previous description of him as a Yankee rough. [Footnote 26: In 1858 _Punch_ had chaffed Kingsley for his _Ode to the North-East Wind_ in a parody purporting to be written by a dyspeptic valetudinarian, who resented the strenuous "muscular Christianity" of the original.] [Sidenote: _Martin Tupper_]