By gar, I find my ardor fail, and all my courage cool, Sir,
De World confess I am de knave—de English call me fool, Sir;
Hard fate! alas, that I am both! my heart, of grief, is full, Sir,
By gar, me wish I was at peace! with honest Johnny Bull! Sir.
Lack, lack a day, fal lal, &c.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
INVASION SQUIBS, continued—THE BOTTLE CONJUROR—PIDCOCK’S MENAGERIE.
In order to understand the next caricature, it is necessary to go back to January 16, 1749, when a famous hoax was played on the public. The ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ for that month says, ‘A person advertised that he would, this evening, at the Theatre in the Hay-market, play on a common walking cane the music of every instrument now used, to surprising perfection; that he would, on the stage, get into a tavern quart bottle, without equivocation; and while there, sing several songs, and suffer any spectator to handle the bottle; that, if any spectator should come mask’d, he would, if requested, declare who they were; that, in a private room, he would produce the representation of any person dead, with which the party requesting it could converse some minutes as if alive, &c.’
The bait took, and the theatre was crowded: patience was exhausted, and some one in the pit calling out that ‘For double prices, the conjurer will go into a pint bottle,’ an uproar began, which ended in the wreckage of the house, which was made into a bonfire outside, and the carrying off of the treasury.
With this introduction we can the better understand ‘Britannia blowing up the Corsican Bottle-Conjurer,’ by I. Cruikshank (August 17, 1803), which represents Napoleon being violently ejected into the air, in an extremely disorganised condition, from the mouth of a bottle which is labelled ‘British Spirits composed of True Liberty, Courage, Loyalty and Religion,’ and in which is seated Britannia, helmed, and armed with spear and shield.
