In this, his first published work, the audacious artist availed himself of an expedient which heightened the effect of most of his later pictures. He introduced portraits of living persons. Conspicuous in the foreground of the South Sea caricature, among other personages now unknown, is the diminutive figure of Alexander Pope, who was one of the few lucky speculators of the year 1720. At least, he withdrew in time to save half the sum which he once thought he had made. The gloating rake in the first picture of the "Harlot's Progress" is that typical reprobate of eighteenth-century romances, Colonel Francis Charteris, upon whom Arbuthnot wrote the celebrated epitaph, which, it is to be hoped, is itself a caricature: "Here continueth to rot the body of FRANCIS CHARTERIS, who, with an INFLEXIBLE CONSTANCY and INIMITABLE UNIFORMITY of life, PERSISTED, in spite of AGE and INFIRMITIES, in the practice of EVERY HUMAN VICE, excepting PRODIGALITY and HYPOCRISY. His insatiable AVARICE exempted him from the first; his matchless IMPUDENCE from the second. Oh, indignant reader! think not his life useless to mankind; Providence connived at his execrable designs to give to after-ages a conspicuous proof and example of how small estimation is EXORBITANT WEALTH in the sight of GOD, by His bestowing it on the most UNWORTHY OF ALL MORTALS." Hogarth was as much a humorist in his life as he was in his works. The invitation to Mr. King to _eta beta py_, given on the next page, was one of many similar sportive efforts of his pencil. He once boasted that he could draw a sergeant carrying his pike, entering an ale-house, followed by his dog, all in three strokes. He produced the following, also given on next page: He explained the drawing thus: A is the perspective line of the door; B, the end of the sergeant's pike, who has gone in; C, the end of the dog's tail. [Illustration: Hogarth's Invitation Card.] [Illustration: Diagram.] Nor was he too nice in his choice of subjects for way-side treatment. One of his fellow-apprentices used to relate an anecdote of the time when they were accustomed to make the usual Sunday excursion into the country, Hogarth being fifteen years of age. In a tap-room row a man received a severe cut upon the forehead with a quart beer-pot, which brought blood, and caused him to "distort his features into a most hideous grin." Hogarth produced his pencil and instantly drew a caricature of the scene, including a most ludicrous and striking likeness of the wounded man. There was of necessity a good deal of _tap-room_ in all humorous art and literature of that century, and he was perfectly at home in scenes of a beery cast.