Each tableau in the _Harlot’s Progress_ is complete in itself; but there is a “solution of continuity”—the progression is not consecutive. More than once a hiatus occurs. Thus, it is Mother Needham, the horrible procuress, who first accosts the innocent country girl in the inn-yard; and it is the infamous Colonel Charteris who is leering at her. The magnificent “palazzo” belongs, however, to a Jew financier; and after the disturbance of the table kicked over, and the gallant behind the door, we can understand how she sinks into the mistress of James Dalton the highwayman. But how comes she to be dressed in brocade and silver when she is beating hemp in Bridewell? The _Grub Street Journal_ tells us that the _real_ Hackabout was so attired when by the fiat of nine justices she was committed to penitential fibre-thumping; but the pictorial Kate in the preceding tableau, sitting under the bed-tester with the stolen watch in her hand, is in very mean and shabby attire. Do people put on their best clothes to go to the House of Correction in? or, again, when being captured—Sir John Gonson allowed her to dress herself, discreetly waiting outside the door meanwhile—did she don her last unpawned brocaded kirtle and her showiest lappets, in order to captivate the nine stern justices withal? The fall to the garret, after her release from prison, I can well understand. Some years have elapsed. She has a ragged little wretch of a boy who toasts a scrap of bacon before the fire, while the quacks squabble about the symptoms of her malady, and the attendant harridan rifles her trunk—it is the same old trunk with her initials in brass nails on it that we see in the yard of the Bell Inn, Wood Street, in Scene the First?—of its vestiges of finery. The ragged boy is, perchance, James Dalton, the highwayman’s son, long since translated to Tyburnia. The real Hackabout’s brother was indeed hanged with much completeness. But I can’t at all understand how in the next tableau this poor creature, when her woes are all ended, has a handsome and even pretentious funeral, moribund, as we saw her, in her dismal garret but just before. Had Fortune cast one fitful ray on her as she sank into the cold dark house? Had a bag of guineas been cast to jingle on her hearse? She was a clergyman’s daughter, it seems. Had the broken-hearted old curate in the country sent up sufficient money to bury his daughter with decency? Had the sisterhood of the Hundreds of Drury themselves subscribed for the enlargement of obsequies which might excuse an orgy? There is plenty of money from somewhere in this death-scene, to a certainty. The boy who sits at the coffin foot, winding the string round his top, has a new suit of mourning, and a laced hat. That glowering undertaker has been liberally paid to provide gloves and scarves; the clergyman—I hope he’s only a Fleet chaplain—has evidently been well entertained; there is a whole Jordan of gin flowing: gin on