Ireland was only one of many embarrassments to the Beaconsfield administration in its closing years. Early in that year _Punch_ published a cartoon on "Bull and his burdens"--John Bull as a patient ox carrying Russia; the Ameer; the Turk; a Glasgow Bank Director (commemorating a recent discreditable financial disaster); a striker; and last of all a Zulu jumping on behind. For this was the year of the unhappy Zulu war, which _Punch_ described as "one of the costliest blunders of modern times"--it cost ten millions--and again as "alike unnecessary, costly, and disastrous." He saw in Isandhlwana not merely a tragedy but a lesson, and enforced it in a cartoon showing a Zulu warrior writing on a slate, "Despise not your enemy." The accompanying verses, while deprecating rashness, assert that the dead must be honoured and avenged. The heroes of Rorke's Drift, Chard and Bromhead, are duly acclaimed, but _Punch_, true to an old and honourable tradition, prints a letter on behalf of the non-combatant officers who gallantly took part in the defence. As the only rampart which they had was made of meal-bags, _Punch_ ingeniously applies to them the phrase, "_Couvert de gloire et de farine_," which Voltaire had used of Frederick the Great, who spent his first battle sheltering in a mill behind sacks of flour. Cetewayo, the Zulu chieftain, was subsequently captured, brought to London and lionized, _Punch_ observing that "the great Farini [the _impresario_ who introduced Zazel, the acrobat who was shot from a cannon] suggests that he should be exhibited at the Aquarium." Throughout the war and afterwards _Punch_ was a harsh and ungenerous critic of the policy of Sir Bartle Frere, whom he regarded as a prancing proconsul and nothing more. Nor was _Punch_ much happier in his treatment of the painful episode of the death of the Prince Imperial who, whether owing to his own rashness or the negligence or loss of nerve of his escort, fell to the assegais of the Zulus. _Punch's_ inveterate anti-Imperialism is betrayed even in the memorial verses:-- Talk not of plots and plans that, ripening slow, Are by this death struck down with blast and blight; We have no thought but for that mother's woe, The darkness of that childless widow's night. Unfortunately, the raising of the question of a memorial to the Prince in Westminster Abbey induced _Punch_ to abandon his resolve of reticence, and prompted other "thoughts," which he expressed with more vigour than good taste. There is no proof that the suggestion emanated from Dean Stanley, as _Punch_ implies, though the Dean certainly favoured a proposal for which a strong precedent could be found in the burial in Henry VII's chapel of the Duc de Montpensier (the younger brother of Louis Philippe) who died an exile in England in 1807. Public opinion was divided, but democratic sentiment prevailed, and in deference to a hostile vote in the Commons the scheme was withdrawn.