GIN-LANE. Gin, cursed fiend! with fury fraught, Makes human race a prey; It enters by a deadly draught, And steals our life away. Virtue and Truth, driven to despair, Its rage compels to fly, But cherishes, with hellish care, Theft, Murder, Perjury. Damn'd cup! that on the vitals preys, That liquid fire contains, Which madness to the heart conveys, And rolls it thro' the veins. Mr. _Walpole_ observes, that the variation of the butcher lifting the _Frenchman_ in his hand, was an after-thought;[2] but he is mistaken. This _butcher_ is in reality a _blacksmith_; and the violent hyperbole is found in the original drawing, as well as in the earliest impressions of the plate. The first copies of _Beer-street, Gin Lane,_ and _The Stages of Cruelty,_ were taken off on very thin paper; but this being objected to, they were afterwards printed on thicker. The painter, who in the former of these scenes is copying a bottle from one hanging by him as a pattern, has been regarded as a stroke of satire on _John Stephen Liotard_, who (as Mr. _Walpole_ observes) "could render nothing but what he saw before his eyes."[3] It is probable that _Hogarth_ received the first idea for these two prints from a pair of others by _Peter Breugel_ (commonly called _Breugel d'enfer_, or _Hellish Breugel_), which exhibit a contrast of a similar kind. The one is entitled _La grasse_, the other _La maigre Cuisine_. In the first, all the personages are well-fed and plump; in the second, they are starved and slender. The latter of them also exhibits the figures of an emaciated mother and child, sitting on a straw-mat upon the ground, whom I never saw without thinking on the female, &c. in _Gin Lane_.[4] In _Hogarth_, the fat _English_ blacksmith is insulting the gaunt _Frenchman_; and in _Breugel_, the plump cook is kicking the lean one out of doors. Our artist was not unacquainted with the works of this master, as will appear by an observation on the _Lilliputians_ giving _Gulliver_ a clyster.