it is truly expressed in the farewell lines addressed to him by "R. C. L.":-- Dear Frank, our fellow-fighter, how noble was your praise, How kindly rang your welcome on those delightful days When, gathered in your presence, we cheered each piercing hit, And crowned with joy and laughter the rapier of your wit. And if our words grew bitter, and wigs, that should have been Our heads' serene adornment, were all but on the green, How oft your sunny humour has shone upon the fray, And fused our fiery tempers, and laughed our strife away! FINE ARTS, DRAMA AND MUSIC I have noticed in earlier volumes with what asperity _Punch_ assailed the conventionalities of academic and Royal Academic Art; how he became, for a while at any rate, a convert to Pre-Raphaelitism; how, later on, the exhibitors at the Grosvenor Gallery superseded the exponents of fashionable orthodoxy at Burlington House as the targets of his satire; and with what unremitting and undiscriminating zeal he "belaboured" all representatives of the Æsthetic movement. The further progress of this reaction can be traced throughout the first half of the period now under review. In the 'nineties Aubrey Beardsley was his special _bête noire_; in the early years of the new century the Impressionist school, and by 1910 the Post-Impressionists, furnish him with unfailing matter for caricature. It was not that those who stood on the old ways were exempt from criticism. Year after year the annual summer show at Burlington House never failed to receive a punctual tribute from pen and pencil. But for the most part these notices are inspired by irresponsible frivolity--a desire to extract fun by burlesquing the titles and subjects and treatment quite foreign to the spirit in which _Punch_ had addressed himself to the task in the 'fifties, and even later. The private view of the Academy became for _Punch_ an annual excuse for an explosion of punning, and the illustrations were a faithful counterpart of the text. Yet criticism occasionally emerges from this carnival of jocularity, as when Mr. Sargent's cavalier treatment of details is noted in 1895; or when _Punch_ in 1902 suggests that the formidable congestion of pictures at the R.A. might be relieved by hanging some of them in the refreshment room; or when he writes in 1904:-- An interesting exhibit at the Royal Academy is a drawing executed by the artist when he was only sixteen years of age. Quite a feature of the show, too, is the number of pictures by artists over that age which have the appearance of having been painted by artists under that age.