[74] The attitude of Venus is graceful; but the cool indifference and _sang froid_ of the Trojan shepherd, carelessly and coolly seated while the fair competitors for the prize are standing up, is intolerable.
[76] This is the portrait of one Leathercoat, many years a porter at the Rose Tavern, and remarkable for his universal knowledge of women of the town.
[77] Hogarth seems to have had a great fancy for bringing King David into bad company. He is in the second plate of the "Harlot's Progress" depicted in the bed-room of a prostitute, and here represented as perched on a harp, at a brothel in Drury Lane.
[78] It was further commemorated as the anniversary of Queen Caroline's birthday.
[79] The chief of these, who appears in something that has once been a tye-wig, was painted from a French boy that cleaned shoes at the corner of Hog Lane.
[80] This post, and that close to the feet of the strutting Cambrian, shows that these safeguards to the pedestrian were then thought necessary: on new-paving the streets soon after his present Majesty's accession, they were removed. During the short time of Lord Bute's administration, an English gentleman who reprobated the idea of making a Scotch pavement in the vicinity of St. James's, being asked by a North Briton who was present how he or any other Englishman could reasonably object to even Scotchmen mending their ways in the neighbourhood of a palace? replied, "We do not object to your mending our ways, but you have taken away all our _posts_."
[81] This is probably a true delineation of the church as it was then. The print was published in 1735, and the year 1741 the church was rebuilt. It seems likely that Marybone, from a neighbouring village, may become the centre of the city: the alteration since the Revolution, 1688, justifies this supposition. In that year the annual amount of the taxes for the whole parish was four-and-twenty pounds; in 1788 the annual amount was four-and-twenty thousand.
[82] From the antiquated bride, and young female adjusting the folds of her gown, is taken a French print of a wrinkled harridan of fashion at her toilet, attended by a blooming _Coiffeuse_. It was engraved by L. Surugue, in 1745, from a picture in crayons by Coypell, and is entitled, _La Folie pare la Decrepitude des Ajustemens de la Jeunesse_. From the Frenchman, however, the Devonshire Square dowager of our artist has received so high a polish, that she might be mistaken for a queen-mother of France.