Our English Sunday is none too lovely or lively an institution, but as yet neither the upper nor the lower classes of English Society have shown any tendency, publicly, to desecrate it. When they do, it will be time enough, if not for the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, at least for the Public Opinion of the country to express itself upon the matter. Meantime, grandmotherly interference had better let it alone. _Punch_ had evidently modified his earlier views as to the saving grace of Sunday dullness in England as compared with the Continental Sunday. The Bill for the Sunday closing of public-houses introduced in 1889 is dealt with in detail and at great length. The cartoon of "Sunday à la Pharisee" aims at showing that the habitual toper will not suffer, but that the decent working-man will be incommoded. It is rather unfortunate, however, that the latter is shown sending his little girl to the public-house for his beer. The accompanying verses are founded on a wonderful fulmination in _The Times_:-- "To hedge people round with petty restrictions instead of teaching them nobility of conduct and a worthy use of liberty, is the perennial resource of shallow and incompetent reformers.... A depraved and servile human nature, cribbed, cabined and confined by an infinity of minute regulations enforced by the policemen, is their reading of the social problem.... A small minority occasionally injure themselves with bad liquor on Sunday, and these reformers can think of nothing better than to forbid the entire Community to drink on Sundays at all." _Punch_ descants rhetorically for nearly one hundred lines on Smugby's Sabbath, fanaticism, Pharisaism, etc., but as a Londoner he had probably never witnessed the orgies of the Glasgow Fair. He never failed to insist on the intemperateness of Temperance reformers, but as a supporter of moderate drinking he was himself often guilty of immoderate language.