WHY NOT AN AMERICAN "PUNCH"?
THE name of Richard Doyle, for the majority of those who hear it nowadays, seems to speak of a somewhat early time, ere the graceful sex had emerged triumphantly from its struggle with the environment of crinoline, and when man still had a tuft to his chin. It is true that Doyle's activity continued till the present day, but his later work, exhibited from year to year in the Grosvenor Gallery, came to the view of a comparatively limited public, and for most of us it is the performance of his youth which has preserved his name in our minds. We associate him intimately with a period when the queen was a fresh, young woman with an oval face and Prince Albert was about encouraging the breeders of cattle, when the magnificent O'Connell was in full ebullience and Sir Robert Peel was conducting her majesty's government with the aid of plentiful quotations from the ancient classics,—a time not very long past, to be sure, but nevertheless, so rapidly do we live now, already quite remote; and the curt line in which the cable recently reclaimed our attention for him merely to say that he had but just died at the too early age of fifty-seven was apt to prompt a sudden misgiving that we had been turning Time's pages altogether too hastily and were several chapters in advance of the lesson for the day. Richard Doyle, we remember, was the Robin Goodfellow, the "Cherub Dicky,"—to borrow the sobriquet of one of the stage-memories about which the affectionate fancy of Elia delighted to play,—of Mr. Punch's early days. We know him also as the creator of the Brown, Jones, and Robinson who made the grand tour; as the charming artist whose Ethel Clive and Colonel Newcome we meet so agreeably in that world of sentiment to which the genius of Thackeray transports us,—far from our electric-light walk and telephone conversation. But a moment's reflection assures us that it is to "Punch" that we assign him, and that to find him we should open again the "valluble mislny" whose familiar cover his pencil designed and whose pages it embellished. A quiet smile, such as Doyle's work for "Punch" is apt to occasion, seems a not unfitting tribute to the memory of his "happy spark," and perhaps for his sake the gathering dust on the volumes of 1844-50 has lately been a little disturbed.
To recur to this "Punch" of Doyle's day is to approach very closely the promising and potent beginnings of the periodical: its pages have never been richer or fuller, its characteristic qualities, the source of its success, never more admirably manifested. To recur to it is also, as indeed is any considerable contact with this enviable paper, to recur to the contemplation of that interesting little conundrum with which the possibly colonial-minded among us are fond of beguiling an idle moment,—the question, namely, why we have not an American "Punch." The forte of the colonial mind, if it may be said to have a forte, is rather admiration than analysis; and this perhaps may be held to account for the fact that the conundrum usually appears not as a query, but as an exclamation, and consequently fails to elicit any other answer than a chorus of interjections. But in turning these early pages, in catching "Punch," as it were, in the open and confiding season of youth, one feels as though possibly his secret might be apprehended, an idea or two caught about his art and his humor with which to approach the conundrum in a more coming-on disposition. In the first place, however, it would be well, if possible, to get some clearer notion than the colonial mind is apt to give of what it is we mean by an American "Punch." It is hardly probable that, although it would like to do so, the colonial mind regards "Punch" exactly as an Englishman does or values it as
