THE IDLE 'PRENTICE BETRAYED BY A PROSTITUTE, AND TAKEN IN A
NIGHT-CELLAR WITH HIS ACCOMPLICE.
"The adulteress will hunt for the precious life."--PROVERBS VI.
26.
[Illustration: INDUSTRY AND IDLENESS, PLATE IX.]
From a picture of the reward of diligence, we return to the
consequence of sloth. The idle and incorrigible outcast,
mature in vice, and lost to society, is here represented in a
night-cellar.[164] In this dreary and horrid cavern of vice and
infamy he is dividing the spoil produced by robbery with one of his
wretched accomplices. The woman that seems his favourite, and in
whose garret we saw him in the seventh plate, deliberately betrays
him. The officers of justice are entering, and he is on the point of
being seized. The corpse of a gentleman, who has been murdered, is
with unfeeling indifference put down a cavity made in the floor for
the purposes of concealment. To show that the grenadiers company
were then, as now, a virtuous body of men, one of them, in a true
Dutch attitude, is smoking in the corner. A scene of riot, likely
to terminate in blood, passes in the background. The countenances
of the combatants, and a noseless woman bringing the porter, are
finely marked. A rope, hanging immediately over a fellow who is
asleep, should not be overlooked. The watches, which are in a hat,
exhibit another instance of Hogarth's peculiar accuracy; each of them
is a little after ten. Some cards scattered on the floor show the
amusements of this earthly Pandemonium.