A magistrate,[57] cautiously entering the room with his attendant constables, commits her to an house of correction, where our legislators wisely suppose, that being confined to the improving conversation of her associates in vice, must have a powerful tendency towards the reformation of her manners! PLATE IV. "With pallid cheek and haggard eye, And loud laments, and heartfelt sigh, Unpitied, hopeless of relief, She drinks the bitter cup of grief. In vain the sigh, in vain the tear, Compassion never enters here; But justice clanks her iron chain, And calls forth shame, remorse, and pain."--E. [Illustration: THE HARLOT'S PROGRESS, PLATE IV.] The situation in which the last plate exhibited our wretched female was sufficiently degrading, but in this her misery is greatly aggravated. We now see her suffering the chastisement due to her follies; reduced to the wretched alternative of beating hemp, or receiving the correction of a savage taskmaster.[58] Exposed to the derision of all around, even her own servant, who is well acquainted with the rules of the place, appears little disposed to show any return of gratitude for recent obligations, though even her shoes, which she displays while tying up her garter, seem by their gaudy outside to have been a present from her mistress. The civil discipline of the stern keeper has all the severity of the old school.[59] With the true spirit of tyranny, he sentences those who will not labour to the whipping post, to a kind of picketing suspension by the wrists, or having a heavy log fastened to their leg. With the last of these punishments he at this moment threatens the heroine of our story; nor is it likely that his obduracy can be softened except by a well-applied fee. How dreadful, how mortifying the situation! These accumulated evils might perhaps produce a momentary remorse, but a return to the path of virtue is not so easy as a departure from it. The Magdalen hospital has been since instituted, and the wandering female sometimes finds it an asylum from wretchedness, and a refuge from the reproaches of the world. To show that neither the dread nor endurance of the severest punishment will deter from the perpetration of crimes, a one-eyed female, close to the keeper, is picking a pocket. The torn card may probably be dropped by the well-dressed gamester, who has exchanged the dice-box for the mallet, and whose laced hat is hung up as a companion trophy to the hoop-petticoat. One of the girls appears scarcely in her teens. To the disgrace of our police, these unfortunate little wanderers are still suffered to take their nocturnal rambles in the most public streets of the metropolis. What heart so void of sensibility as not to heave a pitying sigh at their deplorable situation? Vice is not confined to colour, for a _black_ woman is ludicrously exhibited as suffering the penalty of those frailties which are imagined peculiar to the _fair_.