We cannot add, he was either generous, grateful, or courageous. In his sentiments, his cunning, and his fate, he nearly resembles the famous Colonel Charteris; a Scotchman by birth, and a gamester by profession, he narrowly escaped condign punishment for a crime that was not amongst the foremost of those of which he probably might be accused."[207] Had he lived in the railway era, he would, most assuredly, have been either a king or a stag royal: "The craven rook and pert jackdaw, Although no birds of moral kind, Yet serve, when dead, and stuffed with straw, To show us which way points the wind." The reign of George II is a historical picture of "great breadth," abounding in strongly marked characters, strikingly contrasted; but chiefly undignified, and generally low. The Carnal man is a ruffian rioting in Gin Lane; whilst the Spiritual is typified by a sinister-looking personage, with lank hair, cadaverous visage, and a cock-eye, preaching Free Grace from a tub to a miscellaneous company at Mile-end Green,--the indifference of the unregenerate being indicated by a prize fight in the background. Here a poor rogue is going, drunk, to Tyburn, for having robbed a thief-taker's journeyman of a silver watch, a steel chain, and a tobacco-stopper,--worth altogether forty shillings and threepence, the value required by law to entitle the thief-taker to his price of blood; and there a wealthy soap-boiler, who has made a fortune by cheating the excise, is going in state to Guildhall as Lord Mayor of London. Here a young rake is making violent love to his mother's maid, who has been induced to encourage his attentions from her reading Pamela; and there his aunt, a maiden lady of fifty-two, but having in her own right three thousand a year, is complacently listening to the matrimonial proposals of a young New-light preacher. Here is Colley Cibber sipping his wine at the table of "my lord;" and there sits Samuel Johnson, behind the screen in Cave's back shop, eagerly devouring the plate of meat which the considerate bookseller has sent him from his own table. Here are Johnny Cope and the dragoons riding a race from Preston Pans; and there sits the young Chevalier, unkempt and bare-legged, smoking a short pipe in a Highland hut. Here hangs the sign of the Duke of Cumberland's head; and there, grinning down on it from the elevation of Temple Bar, are the heads of the decapitated rebels. Here Ranelagh is seen shut up on account of the earthquake at Lisbon;[208] and there a batch of gambling senators are hurrying down to the House from the club at WHITE'S, to give their votes in favour of a bill to repress gaming. The several acts passed against gaming, in the reign of George II, appear to have had but little effect in restraining the practice, either at the time, or in any subsequent reign; for though occasionally a solitary loose fish might become entangled in their meshes, they never interrupted the onward course of the great shoal.