"Keen blows the blast, and eager is the air;
With flakes of feather'd snow the ground is spread;
To step, with mincing pace, to early prayer,
Our clay-cold vestal leaves her downy bed.
* * * * *
And here the reeling sons of Riot see,
After a night of senseless revelry.
* * * * *
Poor,--trembling,--old,--her suit the beggar plies;
But _frozen chastity_ the little boon denies."--E.
[Illustration: MORNING.]
This withered representative of Miss Bridget Alworthy, with a
shivering footboy carrying her prayer-book, never fails in her
attendance at morning service. She is a symbol of the season,
"Chaste as the icicle
That's curdled by the frost from purest snow,
And hangs on Dian's temple,"
she looks with scowling eye, and all the conscious pride of severe
and stubborn virginity, on the poor girls who are suffering the
embraces of two drunken beaux that are just staggered out of Tom
King's Coffeehouse. One of them, from the basket on her arm, I
conjecture to be an orange girl: she shows no displeasure at the
boisterous salute of her Hibernian lover. That the hero in a laced
hat is from the banks of the Shannon, is apparent in his countenance.
The female whose face is partly concealed, and whose neck has a more
easy turn than we always see in the works of this artist, is not
formed of the most inflexible materials.
An old woman, seated upon a basket; the girl, warming her hands by a
few withered sticks that are blazing on the ground; and a wretched
mendicant,[131] wrapped in a tattered and party-coloured blanket,
entreating charity from the rosy-fingered vestal who is going to
church, complete the group. Behind them, at the door of Tom King's
Coffeehouse, are a party engaged in a fray likely to create business
for both surgeon and magistrate; we discover swords and cudgels in
the combatants' hands.
On the opposite side of the print are two little schoolboys. That
they have shining morning faces we cannot positively assert, but each
has a satchel at his back, and, according with the description given
by the poet of nature, is
"Creeping like snail unwillingly to school."
The lantern appended to the woman who has a basket on her head,
proves that these dispensers of the riches of Pomona rise before
the sun, and do part of their business by an artificial light. Near
her, that immediate descendant of Paracelsus, Doctor Rock,[132] is
expatiating to an admiring audience on the never-failing virtues
of his wonder-working medicines. One hand holds a bottle of his
miraculous panacea, and the other supports a board, on which is the
king's arms, to indicate that his practice is sanctioned by royal
letters patent. Two porringers and a spoon, placed on the bottom of
an inverted basket, intimate that the woman seated near them is a
vendor of rice-milk, which was at that time brought into the market
every morning.
A fatigued porter leans on a rail; and a blind beggar is going
towards the church: but whether he will become one of the
congregation, or take his stand at the door, in the hope that
religion may have warmed the hearts of its votaries to "pity the
sorrows of a poor blind man," is uncertain.
The clock in the front of Inigo Jones' barn has the motto, "SIC
TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI." Had Mr. Hervey of Weston Favel written upon
the works of Hogarth, he would have expatiated for ten pages upon
the relation which this motto has to the smoke which is issuing from
the chimney beneath; he would have written about it, and about it,
and told his readers that the glory of this world is typified by the
smoke, and like the smoke it passeth away; that man himself is a mere
vapour, etc. etc. etc.
Snow on the ground, and icicles hanging from the pent-house, exhibit
a very chilling prospect; but, to dissipate the cold, there is
happily a shop where spirituous liquors are sold _pro bono publico_,
at a very little distance. A large pewter measure is placed upon
a post before the door, and three of a smaller size hung over the
window of the house.
The character of the principal figure[133] is admirably delineated.
She is marked with that prim and awkward formality which generally
accompanies her order, and is an exact type of a hard winter; for
every part of her dress, except the flying lappets and apron, ruffled
by the wind, is as rigidly precise as if it were frozen. Extreme cold
is very well expressed in the slipshod footboy,[134] and the girl
who is warming her hands. The group of which she is a part is well
formed, but not sufficiently balanced on the opposite side.
The church dial, a few minutes before seven; marks of little shoes
and pattens in the snow; and various productions of the season in
the market, are an additional proof of that minute accuracy with
which this artist inspected and represented objects which painters in
general have neglected.
Covent Garden is the scene, but in the print every building is
reversed.[135] This was a common error with Hogarth; not from his
being ignorant of the use of the mirror, but from his considering it
as a matter of little consequence.
The propriety of exhibiting a scene of riot in Tom King's Coffeehouse
is proved by the following quotation from the _Weekly Miscellany_
for June 9, 1739:--"_Monday_, Mrs. Mary King, of Covent Garden, was
brought up to the King's Bench bar, at Westminster, and received the
following sentence for keeping a disorderly house, viz. to pay a
fine of two hundred pounds, to suffer three months' imprisonment, to
find security for her good behaviour for three years, and to remain
in prison till the fine be paid." When her imprisonment ended, she
retired from trade, built three houses on Haverstock Hill, near
Hampstead, and in one of them, on the 10th of September 1747, she
died. Her mansion was afterwards the residence of Nancy Dawson, and
with the two others constitutes what is still distinguished by the
appellation of Moll King's Row.