Mixed up with 'Arry's selfishness, greediness, and general lack of decency and good feeling there is a certain element of shrewdness, of practical common sense, but it is always exerted on behalf of Number One. Taken all round, he is easily the most disagreeable of all the types created by _Punch_ in a period in which his former complacency had given place, at best, to a somewhat peevish optimism, sinking at times, as we note elsewhere, to dismal laments over our decadence. But, in justice to _Punch_, it is right to add that by far the most severe denunciations are reserved for the degenerates in high places. The 'Arry poems do not show _Punch_ in the light of a Jeremiah or a Juvenal. Taken together, they form a sort of composite photograph of the mean Cockney who belongs neither to the classes nor the masses, who lacks the breeding and reticence of the one and the primitive virtues of the other. Moreover, the unabashed and undefeated complacency of these monologues, apart from their shrewdness, inspires a certain grudging admiration for this entirely impenitent "bounder." [Sidenote: _Punch and the Army_] But we part from him without regret, and with a feeling that he is almost too odious to be true to type. He bulks so largely in the pages of _Punch_ as to obscure the evidences of abiding friendliness to the true democracy on which 'Arry was a mere excrescence. The manners of the cheap tripper might offend _Punch_, but he was genuinely delighted when bands were introduced in the Parks on Sundays to the discomfiture of Sabbatarians and Pharisees; and we find him contrasting the activity of the police in suppressing gambling in Bermondsey with the tolerance extended to certain West End clubs. There was nothing new in this attitude, but we may note a change in regard to his views on emigration, which in earlier days _Punch_ had supported with enthusiasm. In 1877 a curious letter, guaranteed genuine, is published from a settler in Australia, describing the conditions there, and strongly deterring emigration to a country where there were no comforts, and nothing was cheaper than in England save meat. [Illustration: TECHNICAL "'Ellow, 'Erry! Why, 'ow _are_ yer?" "_Eighteen Car-rat_, ole man! 'Ow's yerself?"]