The host of dissenters and St. Charles their black convert routed by the Church canon

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The host of dissenters and St. Charles their black convert routed by the Church canon
etching & drypoint
image: 254 x 193 mm; plate mark: 271 x 195 mm; sheet: 279 x 203 mm
Peel 3383
Published: 
London : Pubd. by W. Dent, March 4th, 1790
Provenance: 
Formerly owned by Sir Robert Peel.
Notes: 

Not in the Catalogue of prints and drawings in the British Museum. Division I, political and personal satires.

Summary: 

Edmund Burke, facing left, squats on the cross (labeled "Orthodox") atop the lantern on the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral (here labeled "St. Paul's Doom"); he aims a violent blast of excrement from his buttocks with the assistance of a copy of his "Sublime and Beautiful") at a figure wearing clerical bands, knocking him from his foothold on the dome at far right; Pitt and two others stand around the base of the lantern (labeled "St. Stephen's Disciples") and emit streams of vomit over the side, knocking Fox (at left), Richard Price, Joseph Priestley(?), and a host of preachers from the dome; Fox drops playing cards, dice, and a dicing cup as he falls, while the others shed papers reading Deism, Unitarianism, Presbyterianism, and Arianism; a flag with the papal tiara flies from the lantern and reads "Test Thirty-nine Articles", and a dove descends from a cloud at upper right bearing an olive branch and paper in her beak announcing the government "Majority 189".

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