"A foolish son is the heaviness of his mother."--PROVERBS X. 1.
[Illustration: INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS, PLATE V.]
Corrupted by sloth, and contaminated by bad company, the idle
apprentice, having forfeited the regard and tired the patience of
his master, is sent to sea, in the hope that a separation from his
associates, joined to the inevitable hardships of a maritime life,
may in some degree reclaim him. He is exhibited in the ship's boat,
accompanied by his afflicted mother, whose dress intimates that she
is a widow, and who had naturally formed hopes of this boy's being a
comfort to her old age. The waterman, with a significant face, points
to a figure on a gibbet, advising him to look at it as emblematical
of his future fate. A boy shows him a cat-o'-nine tails as a specimen
of the discipline on board a ship; this _water-wit_ the abandoned
young man returns by holding up two fingers in the form of horns,
and recommending this Joe Miller of the Thames to look at Cuckold's
Point, which is in the distance. Having forfeited his indentures,
he has thrown them into the river, is totally lost to reflection,
and insensible to the grief of his mother, the ridicule of his
companions, or his own unhappy situation.
That great geographer of the human face, Lavater of Zurich, has very
properly thought a copy of this print worthy a place in his _Essays
on Physiognomy_. His observations deserve attention:--
"Here are the traits of drunkenness combined with thoughtless
stupidity. Who can look without disgust? Would these wretches have
been what they are, had they not by vice erased nature's marks? Can
perversion be more apparent than in the middle profile?"