Note 113 — Chapter L

My dear Lord,—I had your letter some time since, and have now to congratulate you on your two months' spell of labor-in-vain duty being at length at an end. The old sign of the Labor-in-vain Tavern was a fellow attempting to scrub a black-a-moor white; but the present difficulty seems to lie in showing that one is black. Truly, I congratulate the country on the issue; for, since the days of Queen Dollalolla[113] and the Rumti-iddity chorus in Tom Thumb, never was there so jolly a representative of royalty. A good ballad might be made, by way of parody, on Gay's Jonathan Wild,—