; the skeleton is still preserved
in a London collection. The cruel hag's husband and son were sentenced
to six months' imprisonment. A curious old drawing is still extant,
representing Mrs. Brownrigge in the condemned cell. She wears a large,
broad-brimmed gipsy hat, tied under her chin, and a cape; and her long,
hard face wears a horrible smirk of resigned hypocrisy. Canning, in one
of his bitter banters on Southey's republican odes, writes,--

"For this act
Did Brownrigge swing. Harsh laws! But time shall come
When France shall reign, and laws be all repealed."

In Castle Street (an offshoot of Fetter Lane), in 1709-10 (Queen Anne),
at the house of his father, a master tailor, was born a very small poet,
Paul Whitehead. This poor satirist and worthless man became a Jacobite
barrister and protege of Bubb Doddington and the Prince of Wales and his
Leicester Fields Court. For libelling Whig noblemen, in his poem called
"Manners," Dodsley, Whitehead's publisher, was summoned by the
Ministers, who wished to intimidate Pope, before the House of Lords. He
appears to have been an atheist, and was a member of the infamous
Hell-Fire Club, that held its obscene and blasphemous orgies at
Medmenham Abbey, in Buckinghamshire, the seat of Sir Francis Dashwood,
where every member assumed the name of an Apostle. Later in life
Whitehead was bought off by the Ministry, and then settled down at a
villa on Twickenham Common, where Hogarth used to visit him. If
Whitehead is ever remembered, it will be only for that splash of vitriol
that Churchill threw in his face, when he wrote of the turncoat,--

"May I--can worse disgrace on manhood fall?--
Be born a Whitehead and baptised a Paul."

It was this Whitehead, with Carey, the surgeon of the Prince of Wales,
who got up a mock procession, in ridicule of the Freemasons' annual
cavalcade from Brooke Street to Haberdashers' Hall. The ribald
procession consisted of shoe-blacks and chimney-sweeps, in carts drawn
by asses, followed by a mourning-coach with six horses, each of a
different colour. The City authorities very properly refused to let them
pass through Temple Bar, but they waited there and saluted the Masons.
Hogarth published a print of "The Scald Miserables," which is coarse,
and even dull. The Prince of Wales, with more good sense than usual,
dismissed Carey for this offensive buffoonery. Whitehead bequeathed his
heart to Earl Desp