[Sidenote: _"Punch's" Injustice to Peel_]
[Illustration: THE ROYAL RED RIDING HOOD]
If "Jenkins" was _Punch's_ "chief butler"--in the sense of the supreme flunkey--Lord Brougham was his chief butt throughout these years. And certainly no public character in the nineteenth century ever played better into the hands of the satirist. His nose in the most literal sense lent a handle to the caricaturist. His tweed trousers figure as regularly in _Punch's_ portraits as the straw in Palmerston's mouth--which, by the way, is generally traced to a trick that "Pam" acquired in visiting his stables. Palmerston's nickname was "Cupid" from his gallantry: the mythological parallel for Brougham would have been Proteus. One of the earliest references to him in _Punch_ appears in the composite Preface to Vol. vi., in which each of the contributors ascribes to _Punch_ his own characteristics, Brougham praising him for "forswearing like a chameleon every shade of opinion, when for the moment he has ceased to wear it." Thereafter the fun becomes fast and furious. Brougham is charged with writing the flamboyant advertisements of George Robins, a veritable Barnum among auctioneers. His tweed trousers are explained as a cause of his always wanting to get back to the woolsack. He is credited, in virtue of his versatile activities, with the attempt to discover perpetual motion. Brougham's vanity, craving for office at all costs, meddlesomeness, and subservience to the Duke of Wellington are held up to contempt, and in "Rational Readings for Grown-up People" (an early anticipation of the Missing Word Competition) we read:--
If people may, without rebuke, Call Wellington the "Iron----," Why then we safely may presume The "Brazen Peer" to term Lord----.
[Illustration: QUEEN CANUTE REPROVING HER COURTIERS]
The snobbishness of Brougham's arguments on behalf of royal princes in his Debtors' Bill again infuriates the democratic _Punch_, who in 1849 was even more disgusted by Brougham's fulsome championship of Radetzky and the Austrians when they defeated the Piedmontese. But _Punch's_ hostility reaches its height in the verses (accompanying a cartoon which represents Brougham standing on his head) describing the amazing farrago of inconsistencies which composed the mind of one who was at once a charlatan and encyclopædist, a reformer and a courtier. In the same year _Punch_ suggests a Bill should be promoted for "the better behaviour of the erotic and learned lord,"