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PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI.
Volume 104, APRIL 1, 1893.
edited by Sir Francis Burnand
THE BUBBLE SHOP; OR, "ONLY HIS PLAY."
How many deserving persons besides dramatic authors are lookingabout for good situations, and are unable to find them! Mr. 'EnryHauthor Jones was sufficiently fortunate to obtain a good dramaticsituation of tried strength, which, placed in the centre of novel andmost improbable (not to say impossible) surroundings, has, in thehands of Mr. Charles Wyndham and his highly trained companyof illusionists, achieved a remarkable success.
Within the last few years there have been notorious casesassociated with the names of Members of Parliament, but as theHouse is a Legislative Assembly and not an inquisitorial tribunalinstituted for the public investigation of private morality, no chargecould be brought in the House itself against any one of its Membersuntil after a Court of Law had pronounced its verdict, and, eventhen, a Member of Parliament, convicted of a criminal offence,would not cease ipso facto to belong to the House until after a motionfor his expulsion had been carried. As Fritz in La Grande Duchesseexpressed his wish to become a schoolmaster, in order that he mightobtain some smattering of education, so an immoral M.P. (if anysuch there be) would be the very one to stand sponsor for a Bill forthe Better Preservation of Public Morals, with a view to gainingthat elementary knowledge of morality in which his education hadbeen defective. But no one could have brought up some awkwardcase against him in the course of a debate in the House. In the parliamentaryproceedings of Little Peddlington this might be done, butnot in the House of Commons, which, by a very polite but necessaryfiction, is supposed to be a House of Uncommons, far above theweaknesses of the ordinary human nature of mere Constituents.
Model Figures in the Criterion Toy-Shop.
Mr. Stoach (capitally played by Mr. J. Valentine—but everybodyplays capitally in this piece) finds Lord Clivebrooke (Mr. CharlesWyndham—admirable also) between midnight and one in the morningalone with charming Jessie Keber (Miss Mary Moore,—delightful!)in old Matthew Keber's toy-shop, Keber himself (another veryclever impersonation by Mr. W. H. Day) having gone out on the slyto get drunk on money supplied him by the aforesaid unscrupulousStoach, M.P. So what would have to be said in the House shouldamount to this:—
Stoach. What! the Leader of the House bring in this Purity Bill!!Why I saw him myself with my own eyes in a toy-shop, all amongthe toys, alone at one in the morning with an attractive young personof the female persuasion.
"Look at that now," says an Irish M.P., following the exampleof Shaun the Post in The Colleen Bawn, when the scoundrellylawyer brings a charge against the hero of the drama, "An' whatmight you be doin' about there at that same time?"
Supposing, for an instant, the impossible, Stoach would be called