The Apotheosis of Puck

For its one-thousandth issue Puck crowned itself. C. J. Taylor sends the little hero aloft on a winged white horse, lithographic pen raised, a banner streaming "1000th Number!," while cherubs strew flower garlands and blow trumpets ahead of him. Running across the top like a theater balcony is a packed frieze of the characters the magazine had paraded over nineteen years: bosses, dandies, dowagers, foreign types, the whole recurring cast. Light verse beneath completes the celebration. It is a self-apotheosis, and an unabashed one, a commercial humor weekly declaring in gold and flowers that it had earned a place in the culture. The horse is Pegasus; the joke is that Puck knows exactly how grand he is being.