Mr. PUNCH'S
History of Modern England
PUNCH AND THE PEOPLE
O! fair and fresh the early spring
Her budding wreath displays,
To all the wide earth promising
The joy of harvest days;
Yet many a waste of wavy gold
Hath bent above the dead;
Then let the living share it too—
Give us our daily bread.
Of old a nation's cry shook down
The sword-defying wall,
And ours may reach the mercy-seat,
Though not the lordly hall.
God of the Corn! shall man restrain
Thy blessings freely shed?
O ! look upon the isles at last—
Give us our daily bread.
IT is fitting that a chronicle of social life in England in the Victorian age, drawn in its essentials from the pages of Punch, should begin with the People. For Punchbegan as a radical and democratic paper, a resolute champion of the poor, the desolate and the oppressed, and the early volumes abound in evidences of the miseries of the "Hungry 'Forties" and in burning pleas for their removal. The strange mixture of jocularity with intense earnestness which confronts
