Nor did _Punch_ allow the minor Victorian poets and authors to pass without homage, witness his tributes to Coventry Patmore, the "poet of Home and High Faith," and Jean Ingelow, whose _High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire_ is one of the finest of modern ballads, besides touching the high-water mark of her achievement. Professor Henry Morley, who died in 1894, elicited the well-earned tribute, "He made good letters cheap"; while the heroic industry and distinguished talent of Mrs. Oliphant--for _The Beleaguered City_ comes very near to greatness--are fittingly acknowledged in _Punch's "Vale!"_ in 1897. Sir Theodore Martin, as the joint author of the immortal _Bon Gaultier Ballads_, had a special claim to grateful remembrance from one who, like him, had known Astley's Circus in the palmy days of Widdecomb and Gomersal:-- Comrade of our "roaring 'forties," in your pages still From the midmost fount of laughter may we drink our fill; Watch you, Rabelais' disciple, sunshine in your eyes, Shooting with an aim unerring folly as it flies. _Punch's_ loyalty to Thomas Hood was testified in a long and perfectly serious study, in three instalments, of Hood as a poet and satirist, which appeared in 1896. In 1899 he was moved to sing the praises of Marryat in the manner of Gilbert's _Captain Reece_; in 1900 he reiterated his fealty to Walter Scott in verse as unimpeachable in sentiment as it was undistinguished in execution. I think one may safely say that nothing so inadequate to the occasion has since appeared in the pages of _Punch_. But even when the literary quality of _Punch_ was at its lowest he was capable of welcome surprises, as for example in the really charming verses, in 1893, on Izaak Walton's Tercentenary--verses based on intimate and affectionate study of _The Compleat Angler_. Another Tercentenary, that of Milton in 1908, prompted the cartoon in which Shakespeare congratulates his brother poet because every three hundred years they gave _him_ a banquet at the Mansion House, while they only talked about a National Theatre for himself. A Chicago professor had seized the occasion to observe that Milton, if alive then, would be in favour of every advanced movement except Woman's Suffrage, and _Punch_ turned the saying to good account in a mock-heroic sonnet after Wordsworth. One might well have thought that Charles Lamb's reputation was securely established by 1913, yet in that year a member of the London Education Committee suggested that the _Essays of Elia_ was hardly the kind of book to be put in the hands of young women students. _Punch_ dealt judicially with the offender in two letters--one from a prudish parent; the other from a humanist and lover of Lamb who sends a copy of the incriminated volume to his daughter, together with a report of the protest, and some comments on the survival of Podsnap:--