The plates abound with allusive suggestion and covert humour; but it is impossible to attempt any detailed description of them here. "A Rake's Progress" was dated June 25, 1735, and the engravings bear the words "according to Act of Parliament." This was an act (8 Geo. II. cap. 13) which Hogarth had been instrumental in obtaining from the legislature, being stirred thereto by the shameless piracies of rival printsellers. Although loosely drawn, it served its purpose; and the painter commemorated his success by a long inscription on the plate entitled "Crowns, Mitres, &c.," afterwards used as a subscription ticket to the Election series. These subscription tickets to his engravings, let us add, are among the brightest and most vivacious of the artist's productions. That to the "Harlot's Progress" was entitled "Boys peeping at Nature," while the Rake's Progress was heralded by the delightful etching known as "A Pleased Audience at a Play, or The Laughing Audience." We must pass more briefly over the prints which followed the two Progresses, noting first "A Modern Midnight Conversation," an admirable drinking scene which comes between them in 1733, and the bright little plate of "Southwark Fair," which, although dated 1733, was published with "A Rake's Progress" in 1735. Between these and "Marriage _a la mode_," upon the pictures of which the painter must have been not long after at work, come the small prints of the "Consultation of Physicians" and "Sleeping Congregation" (1736), the "Scholars at a Lecture" (1737); the "Four Times of the Day" (1738), a series of pictures of 18th century life, the earlier designs for which have been already referred to; the "Strolling Actresses dressing in a Barn" (1738), which Walpole held to be, "for wit and imagination, without any other end, the best of all the painter's works"; and finally the admirable plates of the Distrest Poet painfully composing a poem on "Riches" in a garret, and the Enraged Musician fulminating from his parlour window upon a discordant orchestra of knife-grinders, milk-girls, ballad-singers and the rest upon the pavement outside. These are dated respectively 1736 and 1741. To this period also (i.e. the period preceding the production of the plates of "Marriage _a la mode_") belong two of those history pictures to which, in emulation of the Haymans and Thornhills, the artist was continually attracted. "The Pool of Bethesda" and the "Good Samaritan," "with figures seven feet high," were painted _circa_ 1736, and presented by the artist to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where they remain. They were not masterpieces; and it is pleasanter to think of his connexion with Captain Coram's recently established Foundling Hospital (1739), which he aided with his money, his graver and his brush, and for which he painted that admirable portrait of the good old philanthropist which is still, and deservedly, one of its chief ornaments.