Behold the man, who, when a gloomy band Of vile excisemen threatened all the land, Help’d to deliver from their harpy gripe The cheerful bottle and the social pipe.  O rare Ben Bradley! may for this the bowl, Still unexcised, rejoice thy honest soul!  May still the best in Christendom for this Cleave to thy stopper, and compleat thy bliss!

This print is now chiefly of interest because the plate was adorned with a tiny etching by Hogarth, in which appear the figures of the British Lion and Britannia, both with pipes in their mouths, Britannia being seated on a cask of tobacco.

Hogarth was fond of introducing the pipe into his plates.  In the tail-piece to his works, which he prepared a few months before his death, and which he called The Bathos, or Manner of Sinking in Sublime Paintings, the end of everything is represented.  Time himself, supported against a broken column, is expiring, his scythe falling from his grasp and a long clay pipe breaking in two as it falls from his lips.  This was issued in 1764—­Hogarth’s last published work.  In the plate which shows the execution of Thomas Idle, in the “Industry and Idleness” series, Hogarth depicts the little hangman smoking a short pipe as he sits on the top of the gallows, waiting for his victim.  The familiar plate of A Modern Midnight Conversation shows a parson in surplice and wig smoking like a furnace while he ladles punch from a bowl—­probably meant for a portrait of the notorious Orator Henley.  Most of the other guests are also shown smoking long clay pipes.

Hogarth’s subscription ticket for the print of Sigismunda was Time Smoking a Picture (1761).  It represents an old man sitting on a fragment of statuary and smoking a long pipe against a picture of a landscape which stands upon an easel before him.  Below, on his left, is a large jar labelled “Varnish.”  The figure of Time is nude and has large wings.  Volumes of smoke are pouring against the surface of the picture from both his mouth and the bowl of his long clay pipe.  In The Stage-Coach, or Country Inn-yard, is shown an old woman smoking a pipe in the “basket” of the coach.  The plate of The Distrest Poet (1736) shows four books and three tobacco-pipes on a shelf.  In the second of the “Election” series—­the Canvassing for Votes (1755)—­a barber and a cobbler, seated at the table in the right-hand corner, are both smoking long pipes.  Apparently they are discussing the taking of Portobello by Admiral Vernon in 1739 with only six ships; for the barber is illustrating his talk by pointing with his twisted pipe-stem to six fragments which he has broken from the stem and arranged on the table in the shape of a crescent.  In the frontispiece which Hogarth drew in 1762 for Garrick’s farce of “The Farmer’s Return from London,” the worthy farmer, seated in his great chair, holds out a large mug in one hand to be filled with ale, while the other supports his long pipe, which he is smoking with evident enjoyment.