Rowlandson the Caricaturist; a Selection from His Works. Vol. 2 by Joseph Grego

served up with a tragic accompaniment. A young female is stretched incapable and asleep, sunk in all the degradation of dead drunkenness. A man who is no longer master of himself is raising his tumbler, with a tipsy desire to have it replenished. The apparition of King Death, bony, frightful, and sinister, is grinning over the back of the soddened tippler's chair, recruiting his legions from a fruitful source; he is supplying the rummer of the drunken wretch from his own vial, little more fatal than the fluid which is debasing and deadening its victims around. A stout woman, also sinking into tipsy apathy, is roused by the shock of finding the king of terrors added to the company; she is thrown off her balance with a start, and, falling backwards on the stone floor of the vault, she will probably break her neck--as the artist's intention seems to hint--and furnish Death with another customer.