My goody, 'tis too late to-day, Time's moving on, and will not stay; But be at rest and save your sorrow, The cart will call again to-morrow. Plate 23. _The Undertaker and the Quack._ The doctor's sick'ning toil to close, 'Recipe coffin' is the dose. A prosperous quack practitioner, meditating over his specific _sovereign pill to cure all ills_, is riding gravely through the streets of a picturesque country town. As his hack is passing Screwtight the undertaker's window, that worthy is thrown into consternation, for he recognises, immovably perched behind the cogitating empiric, the figure of a grim rider with whose presence he is too professionally familiar to be deceived. And leaping on the doctor's hack, Sat close and snugly at his back; And as they reach'd Ned Screwtight's door, Death sneez'd--and Nostrum was no more. The undertaker is plunged into sincere mourning for the loss of his great patron; his less far-seeing wife declares he ought to rejoice at his good fortune, since there's the job of burying the deceased doctor. Screwtight hung down his head and sigh'd: 'You foolish woman,' he replied, 'Old Nostrum there stretch'd on the ground Was the best friend I ever found. The good man lies upon his back, And trade will now be very slack. How shall we undertakers thrive, With doctors who keep folks alive? You talk of jobs; I swear 'tis true, I'd sooner do the job for you. We've cause to grieve, say what you will, For when quacks die, they cease to kill.' Plate 24. _The Masquerade._ Such is the power and such the strife That ends the masquerade of life. A masked ball is represented at its height, gaily attended, and held in the Pantheon or some similar building. A dance is proceeding; the most diversified scenes meet the eye on all sides, and Rowlandson has given full play to his humorous inventive faculties. In the front of the picture the crowd of merrymakers, all unthinking and unprepared, are horrified to discover a new turn abruptly given to the travesty; the tall figure of Death has suddenly cast away his disguising domino, and holding aside a demoniac mask, is revealing to the terrified spectators the actual figure of the skeleton-destroyer, armed with his dart, and in grim earnest to strike. Harlequins, nuns, monks, devils, Turks, toxopholites, bacchantes, jockeys, Punch, Falstaff, Jupiter, Ophelia, Friar Tuck, watchmen, magicians, fair enchantresses and Circassians, archbishops, Roman heroes, and Grand Signiors--characters in vogue in Rowlandson's day--are thrown down pell-mell and trampling one over the other in their eagerness to get as far away as possible from this unwelcome and awful addition to the excitement of the revelry; this ghastly joker who with unequivocal reality is threatening to extinguish their gaieties for ever. Plate 25. _The Deathblow_.