“Mr. _Fawkes_, at his booth over-against the King's Head, exhibits his incomparable dexterity of hand, and Pinchbeck's musical clock, that plays several fine tunes, imitates the notes of different birds, and shews ships sailing in the river. You will also be entertained with a surprising tumbler just arrived from Holland, and a Lilliputian posture-master, only five years old, who performs such wonderful turns of body, the like of which was never clone by a child of his age and bigness before.”--1730. * The deserted daughter of Colley Cibber, of whose erratic life some passages are recorded in her autobiography. 1750. At the Hospital Gate, (“all the scenes and decorations entirely new,”) Joe Miller, * “honest Billy Mills” and Oates, invite us to see a new opera, called The Banished General, or the Distressed Lovers; the English Maggot, a comic dance; two harlequins; a trumpet and kettledrum concert and chorus; and the comical humours of Nicodemus Hobble-Wollop, Esq. and his Man Gudgeon! Squire Nicodemus by the facetious Joe. And at the booth of Fawkes, Pinchbeck and Terwin, “distinguished from the rest by bearing English colours,” will be performed Britons Strike Home;. ** As if to redeem the habitual dulness of Joe Miller, one solitary joke of his stands on respectable authority. Joe, sitting at the window of the Sun Tavern in Clare Street, while a fish-woman was crying, “Buy my soles! Buy my maids!” exclaimed, “Ah! you wicked old creature; you are not content to sell your own soul, but you must sell your maid's too!” ** The commander of the General Ernouf (French sloop of war) hailed the Reynard sloop, Captain Coglilan, in English, to strike. “Strike!” replied the Briton, “that I will, and very hard!” He struck so very hard, that in thirty-five minutes his shot set the enemy on fire, and in ten minutes more she blew up! Captain Coghlan now displayed equal energy in endeavouring to rescue his vanquished foe; and, by great exertions, fifty-five out of a crew of one hundred were saved. “Don Superbo Hispaniola Pistole by Mr. C--b--r, and Donna Americana by Mrs. Cl--ve, the favourite of the town!” Dare Conjuror Fawkes insinuate that Cibber, if he did not actually “wag a serpent-tail in Smithfield fair,” still put on the livery of St. Bartholomew, in the Brummagem Don Pistole? That _Kitty Clive_, the termagant of Twickenham! with whom the fastidious and finical Horace Walpole was happy “to touch a card,” bedizened in horrible old frippery, rioted it in the “Rounds?” If true, what a standing joke for David Garrick, in their “combats of the tongue!” If false, “surprising and incomparable” must have been thy “dexterity of hand,” base wizard! which shielded that bold front of thine from the cabalistic retribution of her nails!