"Nature, propitious, hath luxuriantly featured the circumadjacent grounds, and art hath been judiciously introduced to give richness and effect. The lawn swells with gentle rise and easy slopes; clumps of trees are placed in pleasing irregularity; a serpentine stream flows through the vale, heightening the verdure of the divided pasture; and the villages of Chigwell, Woodford, and Woodford Bridge, dawn through that mass of prolific richness which fills the wide expanse." [127] Had the artist given this speaking countenance to the girl who is exhibited in the first print of the "Rake's Progress," how much more should we have been interested in her situation? [128] 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!" [129] This unfortunate creature, in the memory of many persons now living, used to parade the streets of the metropolis with a hautboy, which afforded him a precarious subsistence. [130] He was brother to Festin who led the band at Ranelagh, and has been dead about thirty years.