A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

1735

12 7/16” X 15 1/4” (H X W)

Etched and Engraved by Hogarth after his painting.

View the full resolution plate here.

As we knew he would, Tom has spent his money and is here being arrested for debt. The lamplighter spills his oil toward Tom’s head, mocking Tom’s “anointment” into the lavish lifestyle, a leisurely existence he has managed to lose so quickly.

The young boys and their impromptu gambling ring on the right side of the plate demonstrate just how well the younger generation follows the example of its elders. Furthermore, the lower classes are here emulating the vices of the aristocracy, a common theme in Hogarth’s plates; he frequently demonstrates the problematic nature of the “better” citizens’ failure to provide effective role modeling for the rest of the nation.

A dog, typically a symbol of sexuality and sexual arousal, perks up. All is not yet completely lost for Tom; Sarah Young dutifully arrives to rescue her ungrateful beau. She is ogled by the arresting officer’s assistant. By the next plate, we will see the couple’s child—perhaps the result of Tom’s payment for the services that Sarah consistently renders.

In another heavy-handed condemnation of immorality, an enormous lightning bolt strikes White’s gambling house. As the creator of the series, Hogarth wields this Zeus-like power to literally smite the places he finds most damaging to English society.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Shesgreen, Sean. Engravings by Hogarth. (1973)

In Plate IV the first inevitable consequences of Tom’s new life style appear; his money runs short. The leek on the Welshman’s hat identifies the date as March 1, the feast of St. David. Tom, dressed as a beau to assure his credit, seems to be on his way to White’s to recover by gambling what he has squandered by excess. Despite the half-drawn curtain on his chair, he has been surprised by a polite but firm bailiff with an “Arrest” notice. The bailiff is accompanied by a threatening assistant who does not disguise his interest in Sarah Young.

Rakewell is rescued not by his aristocratic acquaintances whose carriages and chair stand outside White’s gambling den in from of St. James Palace, but by the plainly dressed girl from Oxford who has preserved the middle-class values of work, thrift and compassion. In a pointed reversal of Tom’s cynical attempt to buy her off in Plate I, she offers her earnings as a milliner to the bailiff. Above Tom an attentive lamplighter by a saddlemaker’s sign (“Hods[on] Sadle”) spills oil from a vessel.

An outdoor gambling school operates beside a post labeled “Blacks.” Here mere children, corrupted by city life, ape the vices of the fashionable adults at places like White’s. One steals Rakewell’s handkerchief; another tiny, ragged figure smokes a pipe and bends like an old man over a newspaper (The Farthing Post). Two bootblacks in the foreground cast dive; both wager their means of livelihood in a throw. The figure with the star tattoo has lost all his clothes to his companion except for his cap and pants. The loser has a liquor glass and measure beside him, the winter three thimbles and a pea (another gambling device). Behind them a news vendor (the trumpet at his side) and election canvasser (the sign on his cap reads “Your Vote & Interest—Libertys”) plays cards with an ape-like sweep. Behind the former a third boy signals the contents of his perplexed neighbor’s cards to the sweep.

As the first state of this print reveals, the entire gambling school, the lightning bolt and the “Whites” sign were added in later states. The ragged youth stealing Tom’s stick is omitted and Sarah Young’s countenance is made slightly more angry in later states (31).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Paulson, Ronald. Hogarth’s Graphic Works. (1965)

CAPTION:

The scene is St. James' Street, Westminster, with the gate and towers of St. James' Palace in the rear. This is clearly the Rake's destination as it is that of all the sedan chairs in the distance. The dock on the tower shows 1:40, and these people, including Rakewell, are on their way to a royal levee. (The presence of Welshmen with leeks in their hats tells us that it is March 1, St. David's Day, which was also the birthday of Queen Caroline, and hence the levee.) Rakewell is now a place-seeker, hoping to recoup his losses. The curtains of his sedan chair are drawn as if he hoped to escape notice between his lodgings and the palace But two bailiffs have stopped his sedan chair, and as he emerges in all his court finery they arrest him for debt (one holds out to him a slip of paper marked "Arrest"). However, the Sarah Young whom Rakewell paid off in PI. 1, luckily passing at this moment, has stopped and offered her purse to save her betrayer. By her sewing box, which is faillng, we see that she is a seamstress and that her name is "Sarah Young.” The general composition involving the sedan chair is indebted to Claude Gillot's Scène des Carrosses, in the Louvre, in which two sedan chairs are shown meeting in a stage play (Antal, pp. 105-06).

The second state turns the print into a satire on gambling. The sign on the building near St. James' Palace is now labeled "WHITES," referring to the notorious gambling house (located in St. James' Street) and a bolt of lightning draws our attention to it. The boys gambling at the right are gathered near a post inscribed "BLACKS." And Rakewell thus becomes a man ruined by gambling. The change was not, however made only to introduce the theme of gambling, since it was already treated in Pl. 6. Hogarth probably added these elements to give a little more body to a rather thin picture. He may have hoped to minimize the sentimentality of the central situation by reducing the figures of Rakewell and Sarah to merely one of three or tour points of interest.

The man on a ladder behind the sedan chair is a lamplighter, who is so interested in the proceedings that he lets the oil overflow the lamp. Behind him is a saddler's sign: "HODS[on] SADLE[r]." From left, boy (1) reads "THE FARTHING POST," a piratical paper that vended gossip and news at a low cost by evading the stamp tax. Boy (2) is a bootblack; beside him is a basket with blacking pot, stick, brush, and rag. At the corner of the curb are a small covered pot and an inverted split glass, such as those used by sellers of spirits (perhaps the boy with no Farthing Post). (3) is signaling over the shoulder of one cardplayer to his confederate, the other cardplayer. The first cardplayer (4) wears a paper on his hat inscribed "Your Vote & Interest—Libertys”, the horn in his belt suggests that he is a newspaper hawker, called a “Mercury.” His opponent (5), getting ready to play a knave, wears a full-bottomed wig; he too has a bootblack's basket, which proves that he uses his wig on shoes (old wigs were the best possible polishing cloths). Beyond him a boy (6) is stealing the Rake's handkerchief, and in the foreground is a boy (7) with a beaked cap turned around, who has won various articles of clothes from (2) at dice (165-166).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Uglow, Jenny. Hogarth: A Life and a World. (1997)

The drama spins from the brothel scene to the next tableau, the arrest in Pall Mall, where Sarah offers her pittance to help. By now it is too late; Tom is gambling his way to hell. When he revised the print of the arrest, Hogarth made this new theme still stronger, replacing a small crop-headed boy stealing Tom’s silver-topped cane by a group of street boys playing cards. Of all the scenes, this is the one Hogarth returned to most, darkening and deepening it, as if the sudden shock of his father’s own arrest had never left him—and making it seem like a judgement on the whole fashionable world. In the painting, the sky about St James’s where the coaches crush together to attend the royal levee is a startling eggshell blue; in the first state of the print, the storm clouds are gathering; by the third state, the sky is black, split by a jagged fork of lighning (253-254).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Paulson, Ronald. Popular and Polite Art in the Age of Hogarth. (1979)

It is a question with Hogarth, however, whether we can say that eros is a perversion of caritas, or whether caritas is a sublimation of eros. Sarah Young is the Rake’s cast-off mistress, whose love—once thwarted—takes the form of charity; in plate 4 she saves him from the bailiffs with her “widow’s mite” in a gesture which resembles Christ’s in The Pool of Bethesda, and she is last seen administering to him (now himself burned out by syphilis, the end of eros) in Bedlam in a pose which recalls both pietas and Hogarth’s own Good Samaritan. In short, the meaning of his Christ and Good Samaritan is less the sum of a series of resemblances to works of art in the great tradition of European art than to his own recent engravings of A Rake’s Progress (163).

The only indication of providence in “modern moral subjects” is the lightning bolt aimed at White’s Gambling House in Rake, plate 4 (which is shown burning in pl.6), and this is an addition which is precisely balanced by a group of dice-playing boys and their game of chance. The parallelism is between White’s and Black’s gambling establishments, of course, but as an addition the lightning bolt becomes a second kind of chance, parallel with the boy’s game (263-264).

In plate 4, when consequences begin to descend, we read, “Approaching the poor Remains/ That Vice hath left of all his Gains.” No mention is made in plate 6, where there is a possibly providential figure, and the verses to plate 8 end admonishing the poor Rake to “cure they self, & curse they Gold” (264).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Ireland, John and John Nichols. Hogarth’s Works. (1883)

The career of dissipation is here stopped. Dressed in the first style of the ton, and getting out of a sedan chair, with the hope of shining in the circle, and perhaps forwarding a former application for a place or a pension, he is arrested! To intimate that being plundered is the certain consequence of such an event, and to show how closely one misfortune treads upon the heels of another, a boy is at the same moment picking his pocket.

The unfortunate girl whom he basely deserted is now a milliner, and naturally enough attends in the crowd to mark the fashions of the day. Seeing his distress, with all the eager tenderness of unabated love, she flies to his relief. Possessed of a small sum of money, the hard earnings of unremitted industry, she generously offers her purse for the liberation of her worthless favourite. This releases the captive beau, and displays a strong instance of female affection, which, being once planted in the bosom is rarely eradicated by the coldest neglect or harshest cruelty.

The high-born, haughty Welshman, with an enormous leek, and a countenance keen and lofty as his native mountains, establishes the chronology, and fixes the day to be the first of March which, being sacred to the titular saint of Wales, was observed at court (It was further commemorated as the anniversary of Queen Caroline’s birthday).

The background exhibits a view of St. James’s Palace, and White’s Chocolate House, then the rendezvous of the first gamesters in London. At this fountainhead of dissipation the artist has aimed a flash of lightning; and to show the contagion of example, and how much this ruinous vice prevails even in the lowest ranks of society, he has in one corner of the print represented an assembly composed of shoe-blacks, chimney-sweepers, etc. (the chief of these, who appears in something that has once been a tye-wig, was pained from a French boy that cleaned shoes at the corner of Hog Lane.), who, aping the vices of their superiors, are engaged at cards, dice, cups and balls, and pricking in the belt. To intimate how eagerly these minor gamblers enter into the spirit of what they are engaged in, one of them is naked, and having staked and lost his clothes, is now throwing for his stock in trade, a basket, brushes and blacking. The little smutty smoking politician is reading the Farthing Post; his attention is exquisitely marked; his whole soul is engaged; and, regardless of the confusion which reigns around, he contemplates, “The fate of empires, and the fall of kings.”

A chimney-sweeper peeping at the postboy’s cards, and informing his adversary that he has two honours, by holding up two fingers, is a fine stroke of humour: as the inscription Black’s, being on a post close to where this congress of the privileged orders are assembled, is an excellent antithesis when contrasted to White’s on the opposite side.

The grouping is good, the perspective agreeable, and the expression admirable. The trembling terror of the beau, agitated to the very soul, is well contrasted by the hard unfeeling insolence of two bailiffs; and that, again, opposed by the tender solicitude of the poor girl. The gunpowder mark of a star on the side of the naked shoe-black, who is putting his last stake on the hazard of a die, is another well-pointed piece of satire on the conduct of those high-born gamesters, who at the opposite house, with a dignified disregard for the future fate of themselves or their families, put their last acre on the same issue. The boy with a pipe and little pewter measure and glass by his side, shows that smoking and drinking drams was not peculiar to adults, but sometimes practiced by young gentlemen before their attainment of what the law calls years of discretion (134-139).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Dobson, Austin. William Hogarth. (1907)

This is the rake’s zenith; in the next scene he enters upon the first stage of his decline. He is ignominiously arrested for debt in St. James’s Street, as he is going to Court in a new suit on Queen Caroline’s birthday, also St. David’s Day (March 1), as is indicated by an irascible-looking Welshman with an enormous leek in his hat. Some temporary assistance is rendered to him by the unfortunate girl whom he discarded in Plate I.; but it is only temporary, for in the plate that follows he is repairing his fortunes by an alliance in old Mary-le-bone Church, then much used for private marriages, with an elderly heiress (42).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Quennell, Peter. Hogarth’s Progress. (1955)

But Tom’s share of the national wealth soon shows signs of running out. One first of March, the feast of St. David and the anniversary of Queen Caroline, he is arrested for debt on his way down St. James’s Street, bound for the birthday celebrations at St. James’s Palace. The roof of his sedan chair is thrown up, and Rakewell is roughly hauled forth. Only the intervention of Sarah Young, now turned London milliner, who sees his plight as she happens to be passing by, saves him from the spunging-house. Behind them stretches the long irregular perspective of the ancient thoroughfare, arched over with a patchwork sky and dim with the colours of a smoky English afternoon. A dense throng of coaches and chairs of St. James’s Street and Piccadilly, a Cockney workman, his ladder poised against the bracket, is replenishing an oil-lamp; and a ragged boy, carrying a basket, takes advantage of the excitement to remove the Rake’s cane. Later, Hogarth was to delete the boy and substitute a knot of urchins—shoe-blacks and sneak-thieves and beggars, lounging and gambling upon the flag-stones of the pavement. Among them is a child absorbed in the Farthing Post—a small piratical newspaper that published news and gossip at a low cost by avoiding stamp-duty (131-132).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4

Lichtenberg, G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s Commentaries on Hogarth’s Engravings. (1784-1796). Translated from the German by Innes and Gustav Herdan (1966)

Here is our hero at his zenith--in his greatest glory. He will never rise higher than this. As we see him now in the fourth Plate, he is also entering the fourth stage of his path through life. In the course of the sun this stage is called Cancer, and it means something like that here for our hero moves steadily on the downward path, and in fact Leo has an eye on him already. The scene is at the corner of the street leading to the main entrance of St James's Palace (St James’s Street) whose gateway we glimpse between the two venerable towers in the background. Before it appears a huge carriage-sedan-chair-and-lackey crowd. It is a great crowd of faithful subjects swarming and pressing around St James's like bees around the hive of the Queen. Here too it is for the Queen's sake. Today is the 1st of March, the-birthday of Queen Caroline, thus a political Sunday, to celebrate which they are crowding to the Temple and the praesens numen. That it is no other day but the 1st of March has been as clearly expressed by Hogarth, at least to his own countrymen, as that there is a thunderstorm here. For to right paces an elderly gentleman with somewhat heightened gravity and inflated self-esteem. In his hat he wears a badge of deep significance; it is a leek, the day is Saint David’s Day (the lst of March) and the man himself a Welshman. He wears the leek in memory of the deeds of his forefathers, regards himself as one of those heroes of old, and accepts, as one sees, in their name, the admiration of the world and the Dicier Hie est with profound dignity, although at the moment there does not appear to be anybody to offer it to him. What wonders may be worked by a badge and a warm imagination! He offers his breast to the early March air, of which only his fingers seem to be afraid, though they cannot really be so, for his muff looks more like a cold air bellows than a warmth accumulator. In this way Hogarth indicates the birthday of his Queen. This preliminary explanation of the scene was necessary in order to understand why Rakewell arrives here with so much splendour.

The hatter's box as well as the wig-maker's in the second Plate have opened, and the tailor's work has unfolded in order to adorn the artistic product of Figg, Essex, Dubois, Pontac and Co for the festive day. The fellow wants to go to Court; to mix with the swarm of bees—the wasp! He does not appear to have a carriage of his own (remember the sign of the Lion), he chose therefore for the transport of his noble self the cheaper four-legged domestic animal, the porte-chaise. Concealed in it, he believed he would come warm and safe to St James's, there to gaze upon the light of the great world in quite a natural way, like hundreds of others, merely by getting out of his vehicle. But he has miscalculated. Certain events intervene. It is a difficult birth; the dandy is fetched out with forceps on the public highway. One has incurred debts which one is unable to pay and one is arrested. That this event involves not an active but an exceedingly passive descent from the vehicle can be seen from the fact that the fore- most bearer is still holding the two poles, and is only unable to proceed be- cause his hindmost colleague with leek in hat is already occupied in raising the roof of the post-chaise so that Rakewell—should not ruin his coiffure. Excellent! A police officer is presenting to him a strip of paper, hardly a few inches long, but also, simultaneously, a cudgel which is somewhat longer, and that strip of paper acts on our hero as if it were the heavenly beam itself which flashes so brilliantly over there to the accompaniment of thunder. Indeed it is no mean weapon which strikes here, but one of the foudres de poche of English Justice which unfailingly find their man, a warrant of arrest; awe-inspiring at any time, but here, introduced by Heaven with a peal of thunder, even terrible! Hamlet, if the ghost had appeared to him when he was leaving a porte-chaise, could hardly have been more petrified than Rakewell here. It looks as if the lightning of Heaven had struck him in the literal sense of the word. Electricity-wise persons will find everything they seek here. The hair-bag rises off his shoulders as if standing on end, the fingers are spread like spikes, the eye stares without seeing. He is really struck and knocked out, for the vermin notice it and fall upon him. The mischievous lamplighter intentionally overfills the lamp, and the surplus streams on to Rakewell's festive clothes. That he does this purposely can be surmised from his lower lip, and his eye looking where there is less to see than is below him. However, he does damage like an honest man, without deriving any advantage from it. Not quite so honest as this satirist upon the ladder is a member of the small club which here upon the pavement of a public street is holding its sessions, without any proper seats. He is stealing a hand- kerchief from the poor all-but-prisoner's pocket. This is how that action is usually interpreted. I too have nothing against it, but I should humbly like to advise people to be rather careful in the use of the word 'steal', and in too hastily declaring as theft every means of acquisition without compensation, thereby reducing the number of honest people in the world by half. The incredible legerdemain of the English so-called pick-pocket really does not deserve the name of stealing. In fact the boy here does no more than any thorn-bush in a hedge along the way; he robs not by pulling but by being pulled, and to plunder by mere reaction is eo ipso no longer plunder. After all, it is the officer of the law who is depriving the handkerchief of its master. Londoners are familiar with this sort of thing. If the tiniest bit of a handkerchief is hanging out of some- body's pocket, the very first man who meets him will say: 'Sir, you'll lose your handkerchief,' and not 'Your handkerchief will be stolen.' For shame! who would say such a thing? Indeed, handkerchiefs are not stolen out of pockets there; they are only lost to responsive fingers on the road. It is the constellation of events that matters.

Misfortunes seldom come singly; even the comfort which he unexpectedly encounters here, and which otherwise would have warmed him like a ray of sunshine, has the form of lightning and humiliation for him. It is impossible to fall any deeper. Rakewell falls in the eyes of the world, and even—in his own. That is the very depths. Sarah Young, the girl who on the first Plate he so light-heartedly turned away, has in the meantime earned a living as a milliner. She passes this way, sees the danger which threatens her faithless seducer, and hastens with her little all to buy the freedom of the scoundrel who had regarded the thousandth part of his income as too dear a price for her honour and faithfulness. She tenders her purse to the officer of the law in such haste that she forgets everything else, and her little bundle of goods falls from under her arm. That sort of thing may help. Even if the dandy cannot attend at St James's, which after the anointing he has suffered he could not very well do, he may at least be able to chew his nails again in his own chair of sorrow till better times! That the girl should be passing here just at this moment seems to me to happen quite naturally. She still loves him, she has followed his movements from afar, and wanted perhaps today to see him once in all his glory. One cannot but heartily forgive this faithful creature who, as we shall see, is to visit him still where gala clothes are never displayed. Besides, days like this, and in this part of the town, are for milliners like blossom time for the bees. They swarm from one Court flower to the other, which on such occasions arrive by the hundred to deck the rich flowerbeds of St James's with their colours. The eye wanders from one to the other, gathering material for the imagination which thus laden with the finest stuff of ideas returns to the working cell. Thus the reasons why little Sarah should be here are poetically valid and good, and so surely will be the moral feelings which our good-hearted gatherer will this time bring back instead of ideas, no matter how despicable was the little nettle which provided the substance for them.

Rakewell surrenders apparently without resistance; perhaps what induced him to it, apart from the sight of the well filled purse, is the all-too- clearly displayed second cudgel which a sort of Figg with an already patched up face holds there in his hand. The cudgel as well as the fellow who carries it, and who, even while discharging official duties, is chewing tobacco, seem both to be as coarse and cold as nature made them, each possessing about an equal amount of feeling. It would be just as impossible to fight against the cudgel with kid gloves as against its owner with academic eloquence. In that position the most reasonable thing one can do is to compose carefully all wayward extremities and to make oneself in words and actions as pliant and compact as possible so that nothing should tear or break while one is arrested.

This is the part of the Plate which continues the story proper. We now come to the side strokes. One would hardly suspect them here, yet a Plate by Hogarth in which these were missing would really be like a picture by Wouvermann without a horse, and therefore of just as little value. Not only are they not missing here, but Hogarth has dealt them with unusual force and bitter roguery, and has wielded the lash so that it is felt through ceremonial wigs, decoration--ribbons and stars.

In the background to the right there hangs from one of the houses a little white signboard inscribed with the name 'White'. This is White's notorious Coffee House, of which every one of our readers must have heard, slight though his acquaintance with English authors may be. This is the very establishment in whose honour the white lightning up there in the sky has been hung out. May the lightning strike you! Hogarth seems to say, and indeed the inmates really deserve something like lightning It is in fact the house where the value of a whole Estate is often staked upon a card or upon dice, and if that goes, houses follow suit, and after them the gold shirt buttons—we had a famous example of this a few years ago—and then—FINIS; it is the place where wealth and beggary change places in a second; the source of thousand-fold misfortunes and misery, of duels, of despair, of incurable madness, of raving mania and suicide. It is for this den that Hogarth intended the lightning with its basilisk-tail. But why did he not bring it right into the house through the window, or more scientifically by the high chimney or the lightning-attractor, the protruding rod?! As it is, it hangs in the air just as un- naturally as Sarah Young's millinery box. Surely, it can be in no doubt as to where it ought to go here! That would only be excusable if the slinger of its fire were a mortal. Many a London house might be under the same sentence for similar crimes, so that in its execution the choice may sometimes be rather difficult. Besides, the zig-zag is really the line of indecision, and I cannot therefore entirely blame a certain good lady for thinking that the reason why lightning went zig-zag, and changed its course so often, was that it again and again turned away from regions where people had repented in a hurry.

It almost looks as if while the lightning shoots towards the Coffee House, the sun is shining upon St James's Palace. Such a distribution of storm and sunshine between buildings in the same street is not only possible but even quite common. If Hogarth really had some intention with this, it may have been to offer his congratulations on that day of national rejoicing to his Queen in perhaps a subtler form than did any of those big-wigs down in the street who are about to be disgorged from their vehicles. But if this was not his intention, or he had something else in mind with his distribution of light, the interpreter of these Plates craves his readers' forgiveness if an assumption which then, of course, could not be valued as a special proof of his acuity, is left standing as an expression of his opinion, at least, of St James's and White's Coffee House.

The lightning strikes towards White's Coffee House. Now let us see how Hogarth strikes at the very same house, or rather at its inmates— it is a real joy to watch him.

Almost opposite to Mr White's Gambling-and-Coffee House he has put a little Gambling-and-Brandy House, outwardly somewhat different, inwardly and essentially, however, of one and the same type. This is Mr Black's House. Since it has neither walls nor roof, the landlord cannot hang out his signboard, much less so brilliant a one as Mr White's; he is satisfied with painting his name 'Black' upon a post, which together with the tables, chairs, seats and arm-chairs of the house forms one single continuum. To this remarkable openness of the building, however, we are indebted for the benefit of being able to see the customers sitting around, and for being able to read, on account of the complete similarity of morals and Club regulations, as if in a convex mirror, what is going on over there behind the thick walls of Mr White's. Anybody raising the smallest claim to poetic feeling must admire Hogarth's art in this, and I really cannot call to mind any trait in the works of antiquity comparable with it, except perhaps in Virgil where the poet lets Aeneas see upon his shield, through the thick mists of the future, the deeds of his descendants, almost down to Pope Peter I. It is mutatis mutandis just the same. What White has dark and walled in over there. Black shows here illuminated and under the open sky. Thus to read straight offhere what is happening over there calls for nothing but eyes and a little knowledge of plus and minus and black and white in which all colours disappear. The following hints, classified under the headings, Black and White, will certainly guide the reader through the whole story. Thus what appears here under Black would be something like Aeneas's shield, and under White like the Roman history relating to it.

After that hint on a method of interpretation, it will suffice to sum up the rest in a few words. One sees that by Black's Coffee House Hogarth merely wished to say:

Here too soup is being cooked.

The two dice-players stake their belongings against one another, and lo! the dice are hanging in mid-air like Sarah Young's hat-box and Mr White's lightning. Hogarth has put much into that Plate which might— and ought to—hang. The scoundrel with the white wig who is on the point of becoming a shoe-black with two sets of instruments, as he has already two sets of clothes, is said to be the portrait of a French boy who cleaned shoes at the comer of Hog Lane, where it was doubtless very necessary. The sly fox had chosen the right stand, just as he chose here the right man. Under his right knee are more dice; perhaps he has even succeeded in making the tipsy Baron believe he could only play with his own dice. The strap which is lying there upon his lap may be used for some game, but perhaps it is only an Order ribbon which the Baron has lost.

Behind him sits a player whose face, elsewhere, might make one think it was hanging. In his hat, whose whole brim has been snipped off, sticks a note which compensates ten-fold for that loss; a real pearl in the crown. 'Your vote and interest' it reads, meaning: 'I beg for your vote and what- ever else you can do for me.' The boy is an Election canvasser, but the main vocal organ by which he makes his living hangs at his side—a little trumpet; he is a Post-boy who with that instrument does much trumpeting, and (translated into White) such a votum may be useful. Clinging to the canvasser from behind sits a spy who indicates to the man with the sash how many Honours his opponent holds in his hand. That item we shall leave entirely black.

Almost directly under the pole of the porte-chaise sits the little politician, his dram beside him, studying his Penny-Moniteur, and smoking his little pipe whose heat serves also to protect its small neighbour, the nose, against the March air. There is an inexpressible warmth and domesticity about that little statesman; he does not hear the thunder in the heavens, he does not see the lightning of the London police as it strikes close to Black's Coffee House. Is it possible to look with greater complaisance into the politics of one's country? All must be well with England, or at least with the nobility to whom the little person belongs. The remainder of White's Coffee House, which is not shown us in the mirror, we shall soon investigate when Hogarth himself takes us there, as he does in fact in the sixth Plate.

The little dog who belongs either to the Welshman or to Sarah Young (we shall have more to say about this later) seems to find so much disorder here in the street among reasonable beings very unreasonable, and to express his disapproval with evident signs of astonishment. That is what dogs do; when they are brought into society they often disapprove of many of its vices, especially the noisier ones, but as a rule only make matters worse by their objections, because of the way they express themselves.

Behind the lamplighter stands a statua equestris without a rider. Down below lives a saddler who has erected that horse to show by way of example what a miserable object is a horse without a saddle. With a similar intention a famous Paris dressmaker chose for her signboard a picture of the Venus de Medici to make it quite clear what contemptible creatures women are if they have no clothes on.

Among the swarm of bees before the Palace entrance stands a queer figure; it almost seems to have something like a beehive perched upon its head. An anonymous commentator remarks that it bears a resemblance, though a very remote one, to the small figure in the Plate 'Noon', who is leaving the French Chapel. The similarity is indeed very remote; more properly speaking there is none at all, for the object there was evidently a wig, whether made of human or goat's or sheep's hair, or carved or formed from plaster of Paris, whereas here it is evidently a basket perched upon a somewhat short female figure. The anonymous gentleman did not take into account that it is raining slightly here, and that in the first prints it is said to have rained much more, and thus it is easy to understand why a girl should dive underneath an empty basket. It is said that the storm on this picture gave our artist a lot of trouble. He touched it up so often that it became worse than before and he had to let another storm blow up whose production he left to a completely strange hand.

What is the meaning of the 41 on the porte-chaise? That it is a hackney chair, that our hero cannot even afford his own porte-chaise and that he could not let himself be carried quite to the gateway of St James's in this vehicle, all that is clear. But why just 41? That Hogarth should have chosen that number without a reason is unlikely, indeed I think it impossible. Mr Ireland conjectures, but with the misgiving and even disapproval which such a doubtful and forced idea deserves, that it might mean 'four to one', because Rakewell is here attacked by four persons, two officers of the law, a thorn bush and a joker with an oil can. This is some- what crude. But what can it be? The Queen was born in 1683; Hogarth in 1698; these Plates appeared in 1735, and they are not even the forty-first of his works. It may be therefore that such porte-chaises have their definite stands in the town and Hogarth here may have indicated something which only a few of his friends would have understood (225-234).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Arrest

The officer hands Tom the arrest slip, as Sarah attempts to grab him to offer her assistance.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Arrest

Shesgreen

he has been surprised by a polite but firm bailiff with an “Arrest” notice (31).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Arrest

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

two bailiffs have stopped his sedan chair, and as he emerges in all his court finery they arrest him for debt (one holds out to him a slip of paper marked "Arrest") (165).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Arrest

Lichtenberg

A police officer is presenting to him a strip of paper (226).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Assistant

Sarah Young dutifully arrives to rescue her ungrateful beau. She is ogled by the arresting officer’s assistant.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Assistant

Shesgreen

The bailiff is accompanied by a threatening assistant who does not disguise his interest in Sarah Young (31).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Assistant

Lichtenberg

Rakewell surrenders apparently without resistance; perhaps what induced him to it, apart from the sight of the well filled purse, is the all-too- clearly displayed second cudgel which a sort of Figg with an already patched up face holds there in his hand. The cudgel as well as the fellow who carries it, and who, even while discharging official duties, is chewing tobacco, seem both to be as coarse and cold as nature made them, each possessing about an equal amount of feeling. It would be just as impossible to fight against the cudgel with kid gloves as against its owner with academic eloquence. In that position the most reasonable thing one can do is to compose carefully all wayward extremities and to make oneself in words and actions as pliant and compact as possible so that nothing should tear or break while one is arrested (228-229).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Dog

A dog, typically a symbol of sexuality and sexual arousal, perks up. All is not yet completely lost for Tom; Sarah Young dutifully arrives to rescue her ungrateful beau. She is ogled by the arresting officer’s assistant. By the next plate, we will see the couple’s child—perhaps the result of Tom’s payment for the services that Sarah consistently renders.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Dog

Lichtenberg

The little dog who belongs either to the Welshman or to Sarah Young (we shall have more to say about this later) seems to find so much disorder here in the street among reasonable beings very unreasonable, and to express his disapproval with evident signs of astonishment. That is what dogs do; when they are brought into society they often disapprove of many of its vices, especially the noisier ones, but as a rule only make matters worse by their objections, because of the way they express themselves (233).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Gambling

The young boys and their impromptu gambling ring on the right side of the plate demonstrate just how well the younger generation follows the example of its elders. Furthermore, the lower classes are here emulating the vices of the aristocracy, a common theme in Hogarth’s plates; he frequently demonstrates the problematic nature of the “better” citizens’ failure to provide effective role modeling for the rest of the nation.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Gambling

Shesgreen

An outdoor gambling school operates beside a post labeled “Blacks.” Here mere children, corrupted by city life, ape the vices of the fashionable adults at places like White’s. One steals Rakewell’s handkerchief; another tiny, ragged figure smokes a pipe and bends like an old man over a newspaper (The Farthing Post). Two bootblacks in the foreground cast dive; both wager their means of livelihood in a throw. The figure with the star tattoo has lost all his clothes to his companion except for his cap and pants. The loser has a liquor glass and measure beside him, the winter three thimbles and a pea (another gambling device). Behind them a news vendor (the trumpet at his side) and election canvasser (the sign on his cap reads “Your Vote & Interest—Libertys”) plays cards with an ape-like sweep. Behind the former a third boy signals the contents of his perplexed neighbor’s cards to the sweep (31).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Gambling

Paulson, Hoagrth's Graphic Works

The boys gambling at the right are gathered near a post inscribed "BLACKS" (165).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Gambling

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

The only indication of providence in “modern moral subjects” is the lightning bolt aimed at White’s Gambling House in Rake, plate 4 (which is shown burning in pl.6), and this is an addition which is precisely balanced by a group of dice-playing boys and their game of chance. The parallelism is between White’s and Black’s gambling establishments, of course, but as an addition the lightning bolt becomes a second kind of chance, parallel with the boy’s game (263-264).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Gambling

Ireland

to show the contagion of example, and how much this ruinous vice prevails even in the lowest ranks of society, he has in one corner of the print represented an assembly composed of shoe-blacks, chimney-sweepers, etc. (the chief of these, who appears in something that has once been a tye-wig, was pained from a French boy that cleaned shoes at the corner of Hog Lane.), who, aping the vices of their superiors, are engaged at cards, dice, cups and balls, and pricking in the belt. To intimate how eagerly these minor gamblers enter into the spirit of what they are engaged in, one of them is naked, and having staked and lost his clothes, is now throwing for his stock in trade, a basket, brushes and blacking. The little smutty smoking politician is reading the Farthing Post; his attention is exquisitely marked; his whole soul is engaged; and, regardless of the confusion which reigns around, he contemplates, “The fate of empires, and the fall of kings.”

A chimney-sweeper peeping at the postboy’s cards, and informing his adversary that he has two honours, by holding up two fingers, is a fine stroke of humour: as the inscription Black’s, being on a post close to where this congress of the privileged orders are assembled, is an excellent antithesis when contrasted to White’s on the opposite side (137-138).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Gambling

Quennell

a knot of urchins—shoe-blacks and sneak-thieves and beggars, lounging and gambling upon the flag-stones of the pavement. Among them is a child absorbed in the Farthing Post—a small piratical newspaper that published news and gossip at a low cost by avoiding stamp-duty (132).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lamplighter

The lamplighter spills his oil toward Tom’s head, mocking Tom’s “anointment” into the lavish lifestyle, a leisurely existence he has managed to lose so quickly.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lamplighter

Shesgreen

Above Tom an attentive lamplighter by a saddlemaker’s sign (“Hods[on] Sadle”) spills oil from a vessel (31).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lamplighter

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The man on a ladder behind the sedan chair is a lamplighter, who is so interested in the proceedings that he lets the oil overflow the lamp. Behind him is a saddler's sign: "HODS[on] SADLE[r]" (166).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lightning

In another heavy-handed condemnation of immorality, an enormous lightning bolt strikes White’s gambling house. As the creator of the series, Hogarth wields this Zeus-like power to literally smite the places he finds most damaging to English society.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lightning

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The sign on the building near St. James' Palace is now labeled "WHITES," referring to the notorious gambling house (located in St. James' Street) and a bolt of lightning draws our attention to it (165).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lightning

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

The only indication of providence in “modern moral subjects” is the lightning bolt aimed at White’s Gambling House in Rake, plate 4 (which is shown burning in pl.6), and this is an addition which is precisely balanced by a group of dice-playing boys and their game of chance. The parallelism is between White’s and Black’s gambling establishments, of course, but as an addition the lightning bolt becomes a second kind of chance, parallel with the boy’s game (263-264).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Lightning

Ireland

The background exhibits a view of St. James’s Palace, and White’s Chocolate House, then the rendezvous of the first gamesters in London. At this fountainhead of dissipation the artist has aimed a flash of lightning (137).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

As we knew he would, Tom has spent his money and is here being arrested for debt.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

Shesgreen

Tom, dressed as a beau to assure his credit, seems to be on his way to White’s to recover by gambling what he has squandered by excess. Despite the half-drawn curtain on his chair, he has been surprised by a polite but firm bailiff with an “Arrest” notice (31).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

The dock on the tower shows 1:40, and these people, including Rakewell, are on their way to a royal levee. (The presence of Welshmen with leeks in their hats tells us that it is March 1, St. David's Day, which was also the birthday of Queen Caroline, and hence the levee.) Rakewell is now a place-seeker, hoping to recoup his losses. The curtains of his sedan chair are drawn as if he hoped to escape notice between his lodgings and the palace But two bailiffs have stopped his sedan chair, and as he emerges in all his court finery they arrest him for debt (one holds out to him a slip of paper marked "Arrest") (165).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

Ireland

Dressed in the first style of the ton, and getting out of a sedan chair, with the hope of shining in the circle, and perhaps forwarding a former application for a place or a pension, he is arrested! To intimate that being plundered is the certain consequence of such an event, and to show how closely one misfortune treads upon the heels of another, a boy is at the same moment picking his pocket (136).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

Dobson

This is the rake’s zenith; in the next scene he enters upon the first stage of his decline. He is ignominiously arrested for debt in St. James’s Street, as he is going to Court in a new suit on Queen Caroline’s birthday, also St. David’s Day (March 1), as is indicated by an irascible-looking Welshman with an enormous leek in his hat (42).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

Quennell

But Tom’s share of the national wealth soon shows signs of running out. One first of March, the feast of St. David and the anniversary of Queen Caroline, he is arrested for debt on his way down St. James’s Street, bound for the birthday celebrations at St. James’s Palace. The roof of his sedan chair is thrown up, and Rakewell is roughly hauled forth (131-132).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Rake

Lichtenberg

The hatter's box as well as the wig-maker's in the second Plate have opened, and the tailor's work has unfolded in order to adorn the artistic product of Figg, Essex, Dubois, Pontac and Co for the festive day. The fellow wants to go to Court; to mix with the swarm of bees—the wasp! He does not appear to have a carriage of his own (remember the sign of the Lion), he chose therefore for the transport of his noble self the cheaper four-legged domestic animal, the porte-chaise. Concealed in it, he believed he would come warm and safe to St James's, there to gaze upon the light of the great world in quite a natural way, like hundreds of others, merely by getting out of his vehicle. But he has miscalculated. Certain events intervene. It is a difficult birth; the dandy is fetched out with forceps on the public highway. One has incurred debts which one is unable to pay and one is arrested. That this event involves not an active but an exceedingly passive descent from the vehicle can be seen from the fact that the fore- most bearer is still holding the two poles, and is only unable to proceed be- cause his hindmost colleague with leek in hat is already occupied in raising the roof of the post-chaise so that Rakewell—should not ruin his coiffure. Excellent! A police officer is presenting to him a strip of paper, hardly a few inches long, but also, simultaneously, a cudgel which is somewhat longer, and that strip of paper acts on our hero as if it were the heavenly beam itself which flashes so brilliantly over there to the accompaniment of thunder. Indeed it is no mean weapon which strikes here, but one of the foudres de poche of English Justice which unfailingly find their man, a warrant of arrest; awe-inspiring at any time, but here, introduced by Heaven with a peal of thunder, even terrible! Hamlet, if the ghost had appeared to him when he was leaving a porte-chaise, could hardly have been more petrified than Rakewell here. It looks as if the lightning of Heaven had struck him in the literal sense of the word. Electricity-wise persons will find everything they seek here. The hair-bag rises off his shoulders as if standing on end, the fingers are spread like spikes, the eye stares without seeing. He is really struck and knocked out, for the vermin notice it and fall upon him. The mischievous lamplighter intentionally overfills the lamp, and the surplus streams on to Rakewell's festive clothes. That he does this purposely can be surmised from his lower lip, and his eye looking where there is less to see than is below him. However, he does damage like an honest man, without deriving any advantage from it. Not quite so honest as this satirist upon the ladder is a member of the small club which here upon the pavement of a public street is holding its sessions, without any proper seats. He is stealing a hand- kerchief from the poor all-but-prisoner's pocket. This is how that action is usually interpreted. I too have nothing against it, but I should humbly like to advise people to be rather careful in the use of the word 'steal', and in too hastily declaring as theft every means of acquisition without compensation, thereby reducing the number of honest people in the world by half. The incredible legerdemain of the English so-called pick-pocket really does not deserve the name of stealing. In fact the boy here does no more than any thorn-bush in a hedge along the way; he robs not by pulling but by being pulled, and to plunder by mere reaction is eo ipso no longer plunder. After all, it is the officer of the law who is depriving the handkerchief of its master. Londoners are familiar with this sort of thing. If the tiniest bit of a handkerchief is hanging out of some- body's pocket, the very first man who meets him will say: 'Sir, you'll lose your handkerchief,' and not 'Your handkerchief will be stolen.' For shame! who would say such a thing? Indeed, handkerchiefs are not stolen out of pockets there; they are only lost to responsive fingers on the road. It is the constellation of events that matters (226-227).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Sarah Young dutifully arrives to rescue her ungrateful beau. She is ogled by the arresting officer’s assistant. By the next plate, we will see the couple’s child—perhaps the result of Tom’s payment for the services that Sarah consistently renders.

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Paulson, Hogarth's Graphic Works

However, the Sarah Young whom Rakewell paid off in PI. 1, luckily passing at this moment, has stopped and offered her purse to save her betrayer. By her sewing box, which is falling, we see that she is a seamstress and that her name is "Sarah Young.” (165).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Uglow

Sarah offers her pittance to help (253).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Paulson, Popular and Polite Art

Sarah Young is the Rake’s cast-off mistress, whose love—once thwarted—takes the form of charity; in plate 4 she saves him from the bailiffs with her “widow’s mite” in a gesture which resembles Christ’s in The Pool of Bethesda, and she is last seen administering to him (now himself burned out by syphilis, the end of eros) in Bedlam in a pose which recalls both pietas and Hogarth’s own Good Samaritan. In short, the meaning of his Christ and Good Samaritan is less the sum of a series of resemblances to works of art in the great tradition of European art than to his own recent engravings of A Rake’s Progress (163).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Ireland

The unfortunate girl whom he basely deserted is now a milliner, and naturally enough attends in the crowd to mark the fashions of the day. Seeing his distress, with all the eager tenderness of unabated love, she flies to his relief. Possessed of a small sum of money, the hard earnings of unremitted industry, she generously offers her purse for the liberation of her worthless favourite. This releases the captive beau, and displays a strong instance of female affection, which, being once planted in the bosom is rarely eradicated by the coldest neglect or harshest cruelty (136-137).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Dobson

Some temporary assistance is rendered to him by the unfortunate girl whom he discarded in Plate I (42).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Quennell

Only the intervention of Sarah Young, now turned London milliner, who sees his plight as she happens to be passing by, saves him from the spunging-house (132).

A Rake's Progress: Plate 4: Sarah

Lichtenberg

Sarah Young, the girl who on the first Plate he so light-heartedly turned away, has in the meantime earned a living as a milliner. She passes this way, sees the danger which threatens her faithless seducer, and hastens with her little all to buy the freedom of the scoundrel who had regarded the thousandth part of his income as too dear a price for her honour and faithfulness. She tenders her purse to the officer of the law in such haste that she forgets everything else, and her little bundle of goods falls from under her arm. That sort of thing may help. Even if the dandy cannot attend at St James's, which after the anointing he has suffered he could not very well do, he may at least be able to chew his nails again in his own chair of sorrow till better times! That the girl should be passing here just at this moment seems to me to happen quite naturally. She still loves him, she has followed his movements from afar, and wanted perhaps today to see him once in all his glory. One cannot but heartily forgive this faithful creature who, as we shall see, is to visit him still where gala clothes are never displayed. Besides, days like this, and in this part of the town, are for milliners like blossom time for the bees. They swarm from one Court flower to the other, which on such occasions arrive by the hundred to deck the rich flowerbeds of St James's with their colours. The eye wanders from one to the other, gathering material for the imagination which thus laden with the finest stuff of ideas returns to the working cell. Thus the reasons why little Sarah should be here are poetically valid and good, and so surely will be the moral feelings which our good-hearted gatherer will this time bring back instead of ideas, no matter how despicable was the little nettle which provided the substance for them (228).