December 31, 1788. Blue and Buff Loyalty.—The sympathy openly manifested by the Whig faction for the Prince's prospects of succeeding to power is satirised at the expense of Blue and Buff susceptibilities. Saturday.—The Royal Physician is drawn looking very downcast, with his gold-headed cane to his lips. 'Doctor: How is your patient to-day?'—'Rather worse, sir.' Blue and Buff Loyalty is made to exult somewhat indecorously: 'Ha, ha! rare news!' Sunday.—'Doctor: How is your patient to-day?' The physician's face expresses restored confidence: 'Better, thank God!' An expression the reverse of loyal or pious is put into the mouths of the disappointed faction.
HOUSEBREAKERS.
1788. [Housebreakers]. Drawn and etched by T. Rowlandson; aquatinted by T. Malton. Republished by S. W. Fores, 3 Piccadilly, August 1, 1791.—This plate represents the domestic felicity of well-to-do citizens being rudely broken in upon by robbers and threatening assassins.
A very critical situation for all the actors concerned. What the next moment may produce it is impossible to conjecture, so much depends upon the first shot; it is truly a moment of suspense. Whether the horse-pistols of the burglars will miss fire, and the formidable blunderbuss held by the respectable householder will lodge its contents—which would be, seemingly, enough to mow down a regiment—in the dastardly bodies of the midnight marauders, must remain a problem, the solution of which is lost beyond recovery.
LOVE AND DUST.
1788. [Love and Dust].—Cinder-sifters pursuing their grimy avocation somewhere in the outskirts, in the neighbourhoods where the great pyramidal heaps of dust and cinders were to be found in the last century. That romance should soften the front of labour, and that Black Sal and Dusty Bob should lighten the sifting of cinders with a mixture of conviviality and flirtation, is but another proof that human nature is everywhere constituted on the same susceptible principles—a fact open to demonstration. The present print, which, in its way, is about as terrible in its vagabond fidelity and grim humour as anything which Rowlandson has left us, has been included in the present series, with a due sense of editorial responsibility, as affording a fair instance of our caricaturist's talent in Hogarth's realistic walk.