Plate III.—The Procuress at the Quack's in this print is said to be designed for the once celebrated Betty Careless, and the remark is countenanced by the initials "B. C." on her bosom. This woman, by a very natural transition, from being one of the most fashionable of the Cyprian corps, became lady abbess of a brothel; and, after frequent arrests and imprisonments, was buried from the poorhouse of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, April 22, 1752. Fielding, in his Amelia, says: "It is impossible to conceive a greater appearance of modesty, innocence, and simplicity, than what nature had displayed in the countenance of that girl,"—meaning her whom he in another place calls "the inimitable Betsy Careless."
Ib. Plate IV.—A card on the floor in this print is inscribed:
"Count Basset desire to no how Lade Squander sleep last nite?"
A fashionable foreign adventurer, of the name of Count Basset, occurs as one of the characters in the Provoked Husband, or a Journey to London, which might have suggested the hint for this name. But, query, whether a real person? or the artist might have meant to satirize the game of Basset.
N.B.—The set of prints of "Marriage à la Mode" is said to have furnished the idea for the comedy of the Clandestine Marriage.
HARLOT'S PROGRESS.
Plate II.—The commentators on Hogarth do not seem to have assigned a satisfactory reason for the particular subjects of the two paintings which ornament the Harlot's apartment in this plate, viz. "David dancing before the Ark," and "Jonah sitting under a Gourd." One supposes them merely intended to convey a ridicule on the old masters, or placed here to satirize the impropriety of adorning rooms with inappropriate subjects. Another, as stories selected at random, but having a reference to the nation of the Harlot's Jew keeper. But as Hogarth's incidents have all a meaning, a better reason must be sought for. They undoubtedly conceal a moral applicable to the two principal figures in the print. David's known breach of chastity in the affair of Uriah's wife, and "uncovering himself" when dancing before the ark, "in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself," which his wife charges him with on that occasion, evidently typify the backsliding Jew; while Jonah sitting under the shelter of his gourd, which sprang up in the night, and which the worm destroyed in the morning, as ingeniously points out the girl's upstart grandeur, and the frail nature of her protection, which even now a worm (her infidelity to her keeper) is rapidly undermining.
Plate V.—Dr. Misaubin, or Mizenbank as Trusler calls him (the lean doctor in this print), was a notorious foreign quack of the day, whose ignorant consequence Fielding thus laughably exposes in one of his introductory chapters in Tom Jones:—"The learned Dr. Misaubin used to say, that the proper direction to him was, 'To Dr. Misaubin, in the world,' intimating that there were few people in it to whom his great reputation was not known. And, perhaps, upon a nice examination into the matter, we shall find that this circumstance bears no inconsiderable part among the many blessings of human grandeur."