ounting-houses in St. Mary Axe, sky-parlours in Porridge
Island, and night-cellars in Blood-Bowl Alley. He reproduces the
decorations of the Rose Tavern or of the Turk's Head Bagnio as
scrupulously as the monsters at Dr. Misaubin's museum in St. Martin's
Lane, or the cobweb over the poor-box in Mary-le-bone Old Church. The
pictures on the walls, the Chinese nondescripts on the shelves, the
tables and chairs, the pipes and punch-bowls, nay, the very tobacco and
snuff, have all their distinctive physiognomy and prototypes. He gives
us, unromanced and unidealized, "the form and pressure," the absolute
details and accessories, the actual _mise-en-scene_, of the time in
which he lived.[23]

But he has done much more than this. He has peopled his canvas with its
_dramatis personae_,--with vivid portraits of the more strongly-marked
actors in that cynical and sensual, brave and boastful, corrupt and
patriotic age. Not, be it understood, with its Wolfes and Johnsons,--he
was a humourist and a satirist, and goodness was no game for his
pencil,--rather with its Lovats and Chartres, its Sarah Malcolms and its
Shebbeares. He was a moralist after the manner of eighteenth-century
morality, not savage like Swift, not ironical like Fielding, not
tender-hearted at times like Johnson and Goldsmith; but unrelenting,
uncompromising, uncompassionate. He drew vice and its consequences in a
thoroughly literal and business-like way, neither sparing nor
extenuating its details, wholly insensible to its seductions, incapable
of flattering it even for a moment, preoccupied simply with catching its
precise contortion of pleasure or of pain. In all his delineations, as
in that famous design of Prud'hon's, we see Justice and Vengeance
following hard upon the criminal....

A hint of the new series had already been given in the _Battle of the
Pictures_, where the second scene, still inoffensively reposing upon the
easel, is wantonly assaulted by a copy of the _Aldobrandini Marriage_.
In April following the set of engravings was issued, the subscription
ticket being the etching of heads known as _Characters and Caricaturas_.
Plates I. and VI. were engraved by Scotin, Plates II. and III. by Baron,
and Plates IV. and V. by Ravenet. Exactly two years earlier, Hogarth had
heralded them by the following notification in the _London Daily Post,
and General Advertiser_ of April 2nd, 1743:

"Mr. HOGARTH intends to publish by Subscription, SIX PRINTS from
Cop