This gunpowder hero being introduced, and evidently waiting for orders, seems covertly to intimate that Thomas Rakewell, Esq., in addition to his other excellent qualities, is a coward.
[73] On the silver cup which the jockey is presenting, we see inscribed, "Won at Epsom by Silly Tom." Our sagacious esquire seems to have lent his own name to his favourite horse.
[74] The attitude of Venus is graceful; but the cool indifference and sang froid of the Trojan shepherd, carelessly and coolly seated while the fair competitors for the prize are standing up, is intolerable.
[75] The Reverend Mr. Gilpin.
[76] This is the portrait of one Leathercoat, many years a porter at the Rose Tavern, and remarkable for his universal knowledge of women of the town.
[77] Hogarth seems to have had a great fancy for bringing King David into bad company. He is in the second plate of the "Harlot's Progress" depicted in the bed-room of a prostitute, and here represented as perched on a harp, at a brothel in Drury Lane.
[78] It was further commemorated as the anniversary of Queen Caroline's birthday.
[79] The chief of these, who appears in something that has once been a tye-wig, was painted from a French boy that cleaned shoes at the corner of Hog Lane.
[80] This post, and that close to the feet of the strutting Cambrian, shows that these safeguards to the pedestrian were then thought necessary: on new-paving the streets soon after his present Majesty's accession, they were removed. During the short time of Lord Bute's administration, an English gentleman who reprobated the idea of making a Scotch pavement in the vicinity of St. James's, being asked by a North Briton who was present how he or any other Englishman could reasonably object to even Scotchmen mending their ways in the neighbourhood of a palace? replied, "We do not object to your mending our ways, but you have taken away all our posts."
[81] This is probably a true delineation of the church as it was then. The print was published in 1735, and the year 1741 the church was rebuilt. It seems likely that Marybone, from a neighbouring village, may become the centre of the city: the alteration since the Revolution, 1688, justifies this supposition. In that year the annual amount of the taxes for the whole parish was four-and-twenty pounds; in 1788 the annual amount was four-and-twenty thousand.