The original paintings, both of the Rake's and Harlot's Progress, were at _Fonthill_, in _Wiltshire_, the seat of Mr. _Beckford_,[13] where the latter were destroyed by a fire, in the year 1755; the former set was happily preserved. Mr. _Barnes_, of _Rippon_, in _Yorkshire_, has the Harlot's Progress in oil. It must, however, be a copy. Mr. _Beckford_ has also twenty-five heads from the Cartoons by _Hogarth_, for which he paid twenty-five guineas. There is reason to believe that _Hogarth_ once designed to have introduced the ceremony of a _Marriage Contract_ into the Rake's Progress, instead of the _Levee_. An unfinished painting of this scene is still preserved. We have here the Rake's apartment as now exhibited in Plate II. In the anti-room, among other figures, we recognize that of the poet who at present congratulates our hero on his accession to wealth and pleasure. The bard is here waiting with an epithalamium in his hand. The Rake has added connoisseurship to the rest of his expensive follies. One of his purchases is a canvas containing only the representation of a human foot. [Perhaps this circumstance might allude to the dissection of _Arlaud's Leda_. See Mr. _Walpole's_ Anecdotes, &c. vol. IV. p. 39.] A second is so obscure, that no objects in it are discernible. [A performance of the same description is introduced in our artist's _Piquet, or Virtue in Danger_.] A third presents us with a _Madona_ looking down with fondness on the infant she holds in her arms. [This seems intended as a contrast to the grey headed bride who sits under it, and is apparently past child-bearing.] The fourth is emblematical, and displays perhaps too licentious a satire on transubstantiation. The Blessed Virgin is thrusting her Son down the hopper of a mill, in which he is ground by priests till he issues out in the shape of the consecrated _wafer_, supposed by Catholicks to contain the _real presence_. At a table sits a toothless decrepit father, guardian, or match-maker, joining the hand of the rake with that of the antiquated female, whose face is highly expressive of eagerness, while that of her intended husband is directed a contrary way, toward a groom who is bringing in a piece of plate won at a horse-race.[14] On the floor in front lie a heap of mutilated busts, &c. which our spendthrift is supposed to have recently purchased at an auction. The black boy, who is afterwards met with in Plate IV. of Marriage Alamode, was transplanted from this canvas. He is here introduced supporting such a picture of _Ganymede_ as hangs against the wall of the lady's dressing-room in the same plate of the same work. [1] The face of this female has likewise been changed on the last plate. In the intermediate ones it remains as originally designed. To give the same character two different casts of countenance, was surely an incongruity without excuse.