With liberty and love."
BEER STREET.
This admirable delineation is a picture of John Bull in his most happy moments. In the left corner, a butcher and a blacksmith are each of them grasping a foaming tankard of porter. By the King's Speech and the Daily Advertiser upon the table before them, they appear to have been studying politics, and settling the state of the nation. The blacksmith having just purchased a shoulder of mutton, is triumphantly waving it in the air. Next to him a drayman is whispering soft sentences of love to a servant-maid, round whose neck is one of his arms; in the other hand a pot of porter. Two fish-women, furnished with a flagon of the same liquor, are chaunting a song of Mr. Lockman's[38] on the British Herring Fishery. A porter having put a load of waste-paper[39] on the ground, is eagerly quaffing this best of barley wine.
On the front of a house in ruins, is inscribed "Pinch, pawnbroker," and through a hole in the door a boy delivers a full half-pint. In the background are two chairmen.[40] They have joined for threepenny-worth to recruit their spirits, and repair the fatigue they have undergone in trotting between two poles with a ponderous load of female frailty. Two paviors are washing away their cares with a heart-cheering cup. In a garret window a trio of sailors are employed in the same way; and on a house-top are four bricklayers equally joyous. Each of these groups seem hale, happy, and well clothed; but the artist, who is painting a glass bottle from an original which hangs before him, is in a truly deplorable plight, at the same time that he carries in his countenance a perfect consciousness of his talents in this creative art.[41]
GIN LANE.
"Gin, cursed fiend! with fury fraught,
Makes human race a prey;
It enters by a deadly draught,