[45] Hogarth, in the first state of the engraving, has made the superscription in the youthful candidate’s letter to be Sir Commodity Taxem, Bart. Nichols is not correct in describing this gentleman as Thomas Potter. Lord Wenman and Sir James Dashwood were the Whig candidates; the Tory representatives were Lord Parker and Sir E. Turner.
[46] In the original painting it is, “the Devil.”
[47] Dr. Shebbeare, in his “6th Letter to the People of England,” audaciously abused the reigning dynasty, for which Lord Mansfield condemned him to stand in the pillory, to be imprisoned for three years, etc. Subsequently Lord Bute complimented him with a pension, which Shebbeare enjoyed to his death.
[48] Marked “New Interest” in the original painting, which is necessarily easier to decipher than the engraving.
[49] As concerned Churchill and the artist, they both departed, it may be said, “warring to the very verge of the grave,” in 1764. Less than a month before the painter’s death appeared Churchill’s familiar lines, treating his antagonist as already slain by his satire:—
“Hogarth would draw him (Envy must allow)
E’en to the life, was Hogarth living now.”
Curiously enough, five weeks after these lines appeared, the poet was likewise gathered to those shades to which he had with sportive venom prematurely consigned his antagonist, in all probability without anticipating the literal fulfilment of his prophecy.
[50] John Wilkes, Radical, 1290; George Cooke, Conservative, 827; Sir W. B. Proctor, the unsuccessful Whig candidate, polled 807 votes.
[51] A less dignified view is taken of the lord mayor’s officious intervention, in the Political Register, 1768, where it states he had degraded, by his personal interference, “the dignity of his office to that of a petty constable;” and in a letter referring to the royal and ministerial favours conferred in return “for his active and spirited behaviour,” the new state official is, in his capacity of merchant-tailor, thus addressed:—
“And now, my lord, as we are brother tailors, how could you be so unkind as not to join eight of us to your right honourable self (nine tailors proverbially making one man), when you were dubbed the other day a Privy Councillor.”