Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/464

 architect, and his lordship's "postilion." This is evidently a blunder on the part of the first commentator. The figure is in cocked hat, wide cuffs, and buckled shoes, and is no more like a postilion than I to Hercules. Is it the earl's "poet," and not his "postilion," that is meant? To the right (using showman's language), sentinels in the peaked shakoes of the time, and with oh! such clumsy, big-stocked brown-besses in their hands, guard the entrance to the fane where the pantomime of Doctor Faustus is being performed. From the balcony above Harlequin looks out. Faustus was first brought out at the theatre, Lincoln's Inn Fields, in '23. It had so prodigious a run, and came into such vogue, that after much grumbling about the "legitimate" and invocations of "Ben Jonson's ghost" (Hogarth calls him Ben Johnson), the rival Covent Garden managers were compelled to follow suit, and in '25 came out with their Doctor Faustus—a kind of saraband of infernal persons contrived by Thurmond the dancing-master. He, too, was the deviser of "Harleykin Sheppard" (or Shepherd), in which the dauntless thief who escaped from the Middle Stone-room at Newgate in so remarkable a manner received a pantomimic apotheosis. Quick-witted Hogarth satirized this felony-mania in the caricature of Wilks, Booth, and Cibber, conjuring up "Scaramouch Jack Hall." To return to Burlington Gate. In the centre, Shakspeare and Jonson's works are being carted away for waste paper. To the left you see a huge projecting sign or show-cloth, containing portraits of his sacred Majesty George the Second in the act of presenting the management of the Italian Opera with one thousand pounds; also of the famous Mordaunt Earl of Peterborough and sometime general of the armies in Spain. He kneels, and in the handsomest manner, to Signora Cuzzoni the singer, saying (in a long apothecary's label), "Please accept eight thousand pounds!" but the Cuzzoni spurns at him. Beneath is the entrance to the Opera. Infernal persons with very long tails are entering thereto with joyful countenances. The infernal persons are unmistakeable reminiscences of Callot's demons in the Tentation de St. Antoine. There is likewise a placard relating to "Faux's Long-room," and his "dexterity of hand."

In 1724, Hogarth produced another allegory called the Inhabitants of the Moon, in which there are some covert and not very complimentary allusions to the "dummy" character of royalty, and a whimsical fancy of inanimate objects, songs, hammers, pieces of money, and the like, being built up into imitation of human beings, all very ingeniously worked out. By this time, Hogarth, too, had begun to work, not only for the ephemeral pictorial squib-vendors of Westminster Hall—those squibs came in with him, culminated in Gillray, and went out with H. B.; or were rather absorbed and amalgamated into the admirable Punch cartoons of Mr. Leech)—but also for the regular booksellers. For Aubry de la Mottraye's Travels (a dull, pretentious book) he executed some engravings, among which I note A woman of Smyrna in the habit of the country—the woman's face very graceful, and the Dance, the Pyrrhic dance of the Greek islands, and the oddest fandango that ever was seen. One commentator says that