In _Pasquin_ a perfectly outspoken attack on Walpole's corrupt methods is united with a comprehensive onslaught on abuses in the stage, law, divinity, physic, society, and on the odes of Colley Cibber, sufficient one might suppose to satisfy even Fielding's zeal. In an exuberant newspaper advertisement of the 5th of March Mr Pasquin is announced as intending to "lay about him with great impartiality," and throughout the play Fielding's splendid figure may be felt, swinging his satiric club with a boisterous enjoyment. The immediate success achieved by the piece was certainly not due to any great dramatic excellence; and that so loosely knit a medley as _PASQUIN, a Dramatic Satire on the Times: Being the Rehearsal of Two Plays, viz. A Comedy call'd THE ELECTION and a Tragedy, call'd The Life and Death of COMMON-SENSE_ should have achieved almost as long a run as the _Beggars Opera_, shows that the public heartily sympathised with the satirist. _Pasquin_ begins with the rehearsal of a comedy, called _The Election_, consisting of a series of broadly humorous scenes in which the open and diverse bribery at elections, the equally open immorality of fashionable town life, the connivance of country dames, and the inanity of the beau monde, are satirised. The country Mayor, the Ministerial candidates and the Opposition squire drink, bribe and are bribed with complete impartiality. A scene devoted to the political young lady of the day affords opportunity for a hit at the sickly and effeminate Lord 'Fanny' Hervey, that politician whom Pope described as a "mere white curd of Asse's milk," and of whom Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed that "the world consisted of men, women, and Herveys." Pope had stigmatised Hervey as _Lord Fanny_, and Fielding obviously plays on the nickname by references to the value attached by certain young ladies to their fans. "Faith," says his comic author, "this incident of the fan struck me so strongly that I was once going to call this comedy by the name of the Fan." The comedy ends with the successful cooking of the election returns by Mr Mayor in favour of the Ministerial candidates, for which "return" he is promised a "very good turn very soon"; and by the precipitate marriage of one of the said candidates to the Mayor's daughter "to strengthen his interest with the returning officer." Having settled the business of the corrupt and corrupting Ministry in his comedy, Mr Pasquin proceeds to exhibit the rehearsal of his tragedy, _The Life and Death of Common Sense_. Here the satirist, leaving politics, applies his cudgel mainly to the prevailing taste for pantomime, a form of entertainment introduced it was said some thirty years previously by one Weaver, a country dancing master, and already lashed by Sir Richard Steele in his couplet: "Weaver, corrupter of the present age, Who first taught silent sins upon the stage."