Ostensibly by, but perhaps a satire upon, Sir Francis Page, ‘the hanging judge’, often branded as one of the most brutal of his age, but a reputation which may not be altogether deserved. He presided at the trial of the poet Richard Savage for murder and condemned him to death, thus attracting the enmity and dirision of Savages’s literary friends, especially Pope and Johnson who both continued to ‘savage’ the judge in their writings for some years._x000b_On pp 8-13 there is an extended description of the ‘evils of dram-drinkingl’.