"Old Gardner the bookseller employed Rolt and Smart to write a monthly miscellany called the Universal Visitor. There was a formal written contract, which Allen the printer saw.... They were bound to write nothing else; they were to have, I think, a third of the profits of his sixpenny pamphlet; and the contract was for ninety-nine years"
(Boswell's
Life of Dr. Johnson
, ed. Birrell, vol. iii. p. 192).
"But first the Monarch, so polite,
Ask'd Mister Whitbread if he'd be a Knight.
Unwilling in the list to be enroll'd,
Whitbread contemplated the Knights of Peg,
Then to his generous Sov'reign made a leg,
And said, 'He was afraid he was too old,'" etc.
Peter Pindar's