Note 195 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 2)
Reading edition
Abraham Langford (1711-74), the most fashionable auctioneer of his day, had his rooms in the Piazza, Covent Garden. He was buried in St. Pancras churchyard, and identical laudatory verses were cut on both sides of his tombstone—
“His spring was such as should have been, Adroit and gay, unvexed by Care or Spleen, His Summer’s manhood, open, fresh, and fair, His Virtue strict, his manners debonair,” etc.
Foote satirised Langford in The Minor as Smirke (not Puff) the auctioneer, who raises a Guido from “forty-five” to “sixty-three ten” by declaring that “it only wants a touch from the torch of Prometheus to start from the canvas.”