E-text prepared by Lesley Halamek, Juliet Sutherland, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 22698-h.htm or 22698-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/6/9/22698/22698-h/22698-h.htm) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/2/6/9/22698/22698-h.zip) PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI VOLUME 104 APRIL 1, 1893. edited by Sir Francis Burnand [Illustration: MODEL FIGURES IN THE CRITERION TOY-SHOP.] * * * * * THE BUBBLE SHOP; OR, "ONLY HIS PLAY." How many deserving persons besides dramatic authors are looking about for good situations, and are unable to find them! Mr. 'ENRY HAUTHOR JONES was sufficiently fortunate to obtain a good dramatic situation of tried strength, which, placed in the centre of novel and most improbable (not to say impossible) surroundings, has, in the hands of Mr. CHARLES WYNDHAM and his highly trained company of illusionists, achieved a remarkable success. Within the last few years there have been notorious cases associated with the names of Members of Parliament, but as the House is a Legislative Assembly and not an inquisitorial tribunal instituted for the public investigation of private morality, no charge could be brought in the House itself against any one of its Members until after a Court of Law had pronounced its verdict, and, even then, a Member of Parliament, convicted of a criminal offence, would not cease _ipso facto_ to belong to the House until after a motion for his expulsion had been carried. As _Fritz_ in _La Grande Duchesse_ expressed his wish to become a schoolmaster, in order that he might obtain some smattering of education, so an immoral M.P. (if any such there be) would be the very one to stand sponsor for a Bill for the Better Preservation of Public Morals, with a view to gaining that elementary knowledge of morality in which his education had been defective. But no one could have brought up some awkward case against him in the course of a debate in the House. In the parliamentary proceedings of Little Peddlington this might be done, but not in the House of Commons, which, by a very polite but necessary fiction, is supposed to be a House of Uncommons, far above the weaknesses of the ordinary human nature of mere Constituents. _Mr. Stoach_ (capitally played by Mr. J. VALENTINE--but everybody plays capitally in this piece) finds _Lord Clivebrooke_ (Mr. CHARLES WYNDHAM--admirable also) between midnight and one in the morning alone with charming _Jessie Keber_ (Miss MARY MOORE,--delightful!) in old _Matthew Keber's_ toy-shop, _Keber_ himself (another very clever impersonation by Mr. W. H. DAY) having gone out on the sly to get drunk on money supplied him by the aforesaid unscrupulous _Stoach, M.P._ So what would have to be said in the House should amount to this:--