“What prevents ye people from walking down to ye house and pulling out ye members by ye ears, locking up their doors and flinging ye key into ye Thames? Is it any majesty which lodges in the members of that assembly? Do we love them? Not at all: we have an instinctive horror and disgust at the very abstract idea of ye boroughmonger. Do we respect them? Not in the least. Do we regard them as endowed with any superior qualities? On the contrary, there is scarcely a poorer creature than your mere member of Parliament; though, in his corporate capacity, ye earth furnishes not so absolute a bully. Their true practical protectors, then—the real efficient anti-reformers,—are to be found at ye Horse Guards and ye Knightsbridge Barracks. As long as the House of Commons majorities are backed by the regimental muster roll, so long may those who have got the tax power keep it and hang those who resist”!!! !!! !!!
Vide Trifling Mistake.
Below this hangs a bill headed “Little Hob in the Well.” {73}
The reproduction of the etching here given is from a very interesting touched proof in the British Museum. Upon it the artist’s work in pencil can be plainly traced. To the right of the picture of Newgate another roughly drawn gibbet can be distinguished. On the bill the words have been added, “A New Song in Defence of the People, corrected,” etc. The profile of the prisoner has been carefully reduced, and a punning sub-title to the whole added, “How Cam you to be in that Hobble?”
The date on the margin is January 1, 1819 (obviously a mistake for 1820), and its publication, no doubt, went some way towards Hobhouse’s election as member for Westminster, which took place immediately after his release on the 20th day of the month in the year 1820.
After his elevation to the peerage Hobhouse took no active part in public affairs. He died as lately as 1869, leaving no issue. Probably the plate was suppressed on the ground that it contained the long quotation given above from the lawless pamphlet for which he was imprisoned.
As I have said in an earlier chapter, it is not my {74} intention to make this treatise in any way a devil’s directory for those in search of salacious curiosities. I shall therefore not dwell upon the suppressed woodcut, which is rather coarse than loose, of “The Dead Rider” in the Italian Tales of 1823. I merely mention it for the sake of those who may be collating the book, and would find themselves misled by Reid’s note on the subject. He speaks of the “Elopement” woodcut being “wanting in two or three copies consulted of the first edition,” as though this were a matter for surprise. He fails to draw the very obvious conclusion that “The Elopement” was substituted for “The Dead Rider,” so that the number of illustrations might continue to tally with the announcement on the title-page, “Sixteen illustrative drawings by George Cruikshank.” He has apparently been confused by the fact, which I notice confuses a good many secondhand booksellers, that every copy has a woodcut entitled “The Dead Rider,” but that it is only the first issue that has two woodcuts with the same title.
And, whilst touching on the subject of Cruikshank’s early indiscretions, it will, I think, be only {75} fair to repeat a story of pretty and spontaneous atonement which I have told elsewhere, and which deals with another suppressed broadside.
No. 887 in Reid’s catalogue is “Accidents in High Life, or Royal Hobbys broke down, Dedicated to the Society for the Suppression of Vice.” Its companion picture is “Royal Hobbys of the Hertfordshire Cock Horse,” which was suppressed as being too suggestive even for so latitudinarian an age as that of the Regency. In the former the artist portrays the discomfiture of the Prince and the Marchioness of Hertford through the pole of the hobby-horse, upon which they have been riding, breaking and throwing both of them to the ground. The lady is cursing her folly in trusting herself to “such an old stick,” while her admirer is exclaiming that he shall try the Richmond Road in the future, the Hertford one being so unsatisfactory. The Duke of York is suffering from a similar disaster, and congratulating himself upon the softness of the cushion by which his fall has been broken, in allusion to his income of £10,000 for having charge of his father.
Now Mr. Bruton, who, like the late Mr. Truman, {76} had the advantage of George Cruikshank’s friendship in later years, was able to obtain authentication or repudiation of doubtful unsigned work from the artist himself, and, amongst others, this plate was submitted to him for judgment. The man’s honesty forced him to acknowledge himself to be the author of this piece of full-blooded vulgarity, but his regret has altered the usual laconic record of “Not by me, G. Ck.,” or “By my brother, I. R. C.,” pencilled on the plate, to “Sorry to say this is by me, G. C.” The old man was, when he came to look back upon a long life of good and evil mixed, somewhat more human than that terribly pious hero of Pope’s—
Who calmly looked on either life, and here Saw nothing to regret, or there to bear; From nature’s temp’rate feast rose satisfy’d, Thank’d heav’n that he had liv’d, and that he dy’d.