France.

With lantern jaws and croaking gut,

See how the half-star’d Frenchmen strut,

    And call us English dogs:

But soon we’ll teach these bragging foes

That beef and beer give heavier blows

    Than soup and roasted frogs.

The priests, inflam’d with righteous hopes,

Prepare their axes, wheels, and ropes,

    To bend the stiff-neck’d sinner;

But should they sink in coming over,

Old Nick may fish ‘twixt France and Dover,

    And catch a glorious dinner.

The scenes of all Mr. Hogarth’s prints, except The Gate of Calais, and that now under consideration, are laid in England. In this, having quitted his own country, he seems to think himself out of the reach of the critics, and, in delineating a Frenchman, at liberty to depart from nature, and sport in the fairy regions of caricature. Were these Gallic soldiers naked, each of them would appear like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife: so forlorn! that to any thick sight he would be invisible. To see this miserable woe-begone refuse of the army, who look like a group detached from the main body and put on the sick list, embarking to conquer a neighbouring kingdom, is ridiculous enough, and at the time of publication must have had great effect. The artist seemed sensible that it was necessary to account for the unsubstantial appearance of these shadows of men, and has hinted at their want of solid f............