[68] The “Friend of Humanity” was intended for a satire on Mr. Tierney, M.P., for Southwark, who in early times was amongst the most zealous of the Reformers. He was an active member of the Society of Friends of the People, and drew up the justly celebrated Petition in which that useful body laid before the House of Commons all the more striking particulars of its defective title to be a body truly representing the people, which that house then, as now, but with far less reason, assumed.
[69] Evidently Giles now reads his newspaper.
[70] This stanza was supplied by S. T. Coleridge.
[71] George Canning, of the Anti-Jacobin.
[72] Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mary Robinson, the one the wife, the other the mistress of George, Prince Regent.
[73] State Lotteries were then permitted, but were abolished in 1826.
[74] Alluding to a coarse skit published by Sir John Stoddart, in The New Times.
[75] The Bishop of Osnaburgh’s Doxy. The Duke of York was Bishop of Osnaburgh, but the Doxy here mentioned alludes neither to Orthodoxy nor to Heterodoxy, but simply to Mrs. Mary Anne Clarke, the wife of a stonemason. She became the mistress of this reverend Bishop, who was also Commander of the Forces, and to whose memory a column was erected—Heaven only knows why—at the junction of Waterloo-place and St. James’s-park. The Duke got into debt, and Mrs. Clarke had to find money by the sale of commissions in the Army—it is said, indeed, that she had also applications for bishoprics and deaneries. The Duke of York had control of the Army, and as the regulation price of a majority was £2,600 and of a captaincy £1,500 while Mrs. Clarke only charged £900 and £700 respectively, she drove, for awhile, a thriving trade; but at last Colonel Wardle brought the scandal before the House of Commons, and the Duke was obliged to resign his post.
[76] Two Boots, an allusion to George IV., and the next few lines refer to his ill-used wife, Caroline of Brunswick, who died in August, 1821, shortly after his coronation.
[77] A favourite phrase of the worthy Poet Laureate.