Everybody but Mr. Disraeli and Mr. Gladstone seems to think the Government has done the thing shabbily. To be sure, the Government ought to know best. _Punch_, with Mr. Fawcett, would have preferred that England should have paid every penny of the bill. India has certainly _not_ invited the Prince, and is as little in a position to invite him as she is to decline his visit: is certainly _not_ as well able to afford the expense of entertaining him as Canada was. As to the feeling of the Working-men (_Punch_ is a representative Working-man, and knows), nineteen-twentieths of them--as Mr. Burt, with characteristic straightforwardness admitted--neither think nor care a ha'penny about the matter: the other twentieth, including the blatant gentlemen who get up nasty noisy little mobs in Trafalgar Square, and who claim to speak for the Working-men, because they speak, peculiarly, for themselves, oppose the visit and the grant for it--as they oppose everything suggested by their betters, and, in particular, all grants to members of the Royal Family. They have found just enough voice in Parliament to show how thoroughly they stand opposed to general opinion. The Prince's return was welcomed with a disclaimer of all venal courtiership:-- 'Tis no mere flourish of paid pen, no phrase of courtier's tongue Proclaims us loyal to our line of law-abiding Kings; 'Tis for a son in more than name that England's heart is strung To this high note of welcome that through the welkin rings. * * * * * He is kindly, gay and gracious--he is manly, bold and brave; He bore him manly, princely, as an English prince should do; He took the rubs and roughings of travel like a man, And, if he won new friends in crowds, to the old friends still was true. It was once said of an old Tory that, although generally intelligent, whenever he began to talk of the Royal Family or the nobility, his jaw dropped, and he became quite inarticulate. _Punch's_ jaw certainly did not drop over the Queen's new title, for which he had no welcome. He thought it a piece of Oriental Disraelian clap-trap, gave a sarcastic account of the Proclamation at Delhi, and published cartoons in which Disraeli figured as repainting the sign of the old Queen's Head, and as a magician with new crowns for old. _Punch's_ antipathy to the new style also found vent in a "Hymn to Victoria" after Ben Jonson:-- Queen or Empress, Lady fair, Sovran of the swelling deep, Who, in distant Orient air, Dost the sway of nations keep, Must we, changing style with scene, Hail an Empress in our Queen? Where the tiger haunts the glade, Where the mystic Ganges flows, Where we English, unafraid, Govern friends who once were foes, There thy power is felt, unseen, There men bow to England's Queen.