February 20, 1799. Cries of London. No. 3. Last Dying Speech and Confession. Published by R. Ackermann, 101 Strand.—A street ballad singer, of the St. Giles' order, is crying the last speech of 'the unfortunate malefactors who were executed this morning:' a common enough announcement when the extreme punishment of hanging visited small offences, and executions were of more frequent occurrence. That the fear of capital punishment did not act as a corrective to theft is illustrated in the background of the print, where a mere infant is drawn in the act of picking the pocket of a passing pedestrian.
February 20, 1799. Cries of London. No. 4. Do you want any brick-dust? Published by R. Ackermann, 101 Strand.—From this plate it seems that brick-dust, in the artist's days, was sold like sand. A patient donkey is saddled with an enormous pannier of brick-dust, and the vendor is pouring the contents of a measure into a bowl, held at the door of a highly respectable residence, by a pretty maid, to whose personal captivations the attentions of the brick-dust dealer are most particularly addressed.
March 1, 1799. [Cries of London. No. 5.] Water-cresses, come buy my Water-cresses. An old shylock-like person is knocking at a door in Portland Street (Mrs. Burke's), and is solicited to buy water-cresses by a neat maiden with a pretty face and a tall shapely form; the old reprobate is leering at the water-cress girl, and is disregarding a further offer of cresses from a more ragged and juvenile seller. A pair of highly-coloured damsels, redundant in charms and florid finery, are peering out of an upper window at the aged visitor.
CRIES OF LONDON. NO. 5, 'WATER-CRESSES, COME BUY MY WATER-CRESSES.'
1799. Cries of London. No. 6. All a-growing, a-growing; here's flowers for your gardens.—A smart young gardener, with a substantial cart, drawn by a donkey, has a handsome selection of various evergreens and flowers for sale; he is standing at the door of a mansion, where a lady and little girl are choosing from his stock of geraniums in pots.
May 4, 1799. Cries of London. No. 8. Hot cross buns, two a penny buns.—A decent woman, wearing a white apron, and with a cloth over her basket, is supplying a patroness with a plateful of hot cross buns. A pretty woman, in a neat morning dress, is buying buns, and her children by her side are tasting the same without any loss of time. Outside a church, in the background, is a stout dignitary, with flowing gown, sleeves, and full wig, who is sweeping away from an appeal for charity addressed to him by a beggar woman and her offspring.
February 1, 1799. [A Charm for a Democracy], Reviewed, Analysed, and Destroyed, January 1, 1799, to the confusion of its Affiliated Friends. Published for the Anti-Jacobin Review, by T. Whittle, Peterborough Court, Fleet Street.—The Tory party at the beginning of 1799 (the parliamentary session had opened at the end of November 1788) endeavoured to stifle the Opposition by raising outcries against sedition, and by denouncing publications of a revolutionary tendency, with which they pretended to implicate the Whigs. On the strength of certain alarmist tracts, extraordinary measures were taken to restrain the liberty of the press, and a few months later, in July, the Ministry went so far as to put into effect the extreme measure of subjecting printing presses to a licence. The organs of the Tories, exulting in the discomfiture of their opponents, were continually urging increased and severer political persecutions, while they pretended that the members of the Opposition were, in despair of succeeding in preserving their party by fair means, identifying themselves with the more treasonable writers, and were laying secret trains for the destruction of the Constitution. The King's Bench, Newgate, and Coldbath Fields began to be crowded with political prisoners, the last-mentioned receiving the popular nickname of the Bastille. The Anti-Jacobin Review was, as usual, peculiarly smart at the expense of the malcontents, and Rowlandson's assistance was enlisted to prepare a cartoon which, it was supposed, would expose the Whigs in their true colours, and hold up the abettors of sedition to the execration of all loyal subjects.
There are four elements displayed in this general view of the fancied emergency: the supernatural department, headed by the arch-fiend in person; the Radical pamphleteers and so-called workers of treason; the prominent members of the disconcerted Opposition and their followers; and the King and his ministers displayed, as Olympians, in the clouds. The Infernal Influence is superintending the preparation of the charm, which Horne Tooke and his friends, as the witches in Macbeth, are working at a boiling cauldron; the nature of the component parts of the conjuration are thus set forth:—