Note 128 — HOGARTH ILLUSTRATED. (continued 2)
Reading edition
When this was first published, the following quotation from Pope's Dunciad was inscribed under the print:—
"Studious he sate, with all his books around, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound: Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom there; Then wrote and flounder'd on in mere despair."
All his books, amounting to only four, was, I suppose, the artist's reason for erasing the lines.
A reduced copy, with some variations, is placed as the headpiece of an Epistle to Alexander Pope, Esq., by Mr. Banckes. One of the variations is, a cobweb over the grate. If this good gentleman had consulted his own headpiece, he would have recollected that, as even a poet must sometimes eat, and the poor bard had no other room, or grate, it was natural to think he must sometimes have a fire to dress his scanty meal. In almost every other respect he is indeed a much more unaccommodated man than was Stephen Duck when he was a thresher. Duck, having made some rhymes, which for a thresher were deemed extraordinary, was taken out of his barn, furnished with a stock in trade, and set up as a poet. After that time he never wrote a stanza; his Muse forsook him; he was haunted by the foul fiend, and hanged or drowned himself, because Queen Caroline, who had made him a parson, could not make him a bishop.
In one of the journals of the day, dated June 30, 1736, I find written as follows:—"A handsome entertainment was this day given at Charlton, in Wiltshire, to the threshers of that village, by the Lord Viscount Palmerston, who has given money to purchase a piece of land, the produce of which is to be laid out in an annual entertainment, on the 30th of June, for ever, in commemoration of Stephen Duck, who was a thresher at that place." Happy man! patronized by the Queen's Majesty, and
"So lov'd, so honour'd, in the House of Lords!"