’Twas the same thing to him whether stocks fell or rose;
For blast and for mildew he car’d not a pin,
His crops never fail’d, for they grew on the chin.”
[171] Henry Kett (1761-1825) was a frequent subject of caricatures. The learned Thomas Warton’s comment on his “Juvenile Poems” was—
“Our Kett not a poet!
Why, how can you say so?
For if he’s no Ovid
I’m sure he’s a Naso.”
From his long face he was known as “Horse” Kett, and, enjoying the joke, he would say that he was going to “trot down the ‘High.’”
[172] George Stubbs, A.R.A., the great horse-painter of the eighteenth century. He painted sixteen race-horses, including Eclipse, for the Turf Review. His physical strength was such that he was said to have carried a dead horse up three flights of stairs to his dissecting attic. His “Fall of Phaeton” was popular, and showed him capable of great things. Many of Stubbs’s finest pictures are now in the possession of the King, the Duke of Westminster, Lord Rosebery, and Sir Walter Gilbey, who has produced an important work on his life and art. Stubbs lived for forty years at 24 Somerset Street, Portman Square.