[Illustration: A SHOW OF HANS (Richter interprets Elgar's _Dream_.)] In 1903 _Punch_ was seriously perturbed by the glut of prodigies, and in a cartoon addresses the child violinist, "Get thee to a _nursery_. Go!" Yet in 1905, though "not as a rule favourably inclined to infant phenomena," he makes an exception in favour of the thirteen-year-old Mischa Elman. In 1908, in a burlesque account of "A Day in the Life of a Strenuous Statesman," the diarist records his reply to a Socialist Member that "the Government would think not once but twice before they refused to grant special pensions to the parents of infant prodigies earning less than £5,000 a year." On the compulsory musical teaching of the ingenuous youth _Punch_ held views which may be gathered from his picture in 1911 of the unhappy small boy at the pianoforte, with the legend: "The only thing that comes between us, Mother, is this wretched music!" While _Punch_ was benevolent to the little musician, he was decidedly hostile to the cult of bigness in musical scores and instrumentation, and more than once assails the prevalent "Jumbomania" as illustrated by huge bands and the extravagant explosion of all the sonorities. When Strauss in 1903 was the _dernier cri_ of modernism, _Punch_ addressed him in perversion of a much-parodied model:-- O teach us that Discord is duty, That Melody maketh for sin: Come down and redeem us from Beauty, Great Despot of Din. [Sidenote: _Elegies and Eulogies_] [Illustration: _PLAY'S_ THE THING! HAMLET (_Mr. Punch_) to OPHIDLIA (the Danish infant musical prodigy): "Get thee to a _nursery_. Go!"] Many heroes and heroines of the Victorian musical world passed away in these years. I have already spoken of Sullivan, but may note the tribute to Rubinstein in 1894 and the song to Sims Reeves in 1895, in which _Punch_, who had on occasion handled him severely for his failures to fulfil his engagements, was now only concerned to chronicle the triumphs, in ballad and oratorio, of "the king of the tenor tribe" who had fallen in old age on evil days. Sims Reeves, when well over seventy, had been reduced to singing in the Music-Halls, and in 1897 _Punch_ cordially supported the appeal for funds issued by the _Daily Telegraph_. The results of this public subscription, supplemented by a Civil List pension, helped to relieve his few remaining years.