[3] Beautiful female faces in Hogarth’s plates and pictures. Among others, the bride-elect with handkerchief passed through her wedding-ring; the countess kneeling to her dying lord (in the _Marriage_); the charming wife mending the galligaskins in the _Distressed Poet_; the poor wretch whom the taskmaster is about to strike with a cane, in the Bridewell scene of the _Rake’s Progress_; the milkmaid, in the _Enraged Musician_; the blooming English girl (for she is no more an Egyptian than you or I) in “_Pharaoh’s Daughter_;” the pure soul who sympathizes with the mad spendthrift, in the Bedlam scene of the _Rake’s Progress_; the hooped belle who is chucking the little black boy under the chin, in the _Taste in High Life_—a priceless performance, and one that should be re-engraved in this age, as a satire against exaggerated crinoline. Lord Charlemont’s famous picture, _Virtue in Danger_, I have not seen. [4] The damages and costs must have amounted to a round sum; but it is to me marvellous that in those days of legal chicanery the action should have been so brief, and so conclusively decided. Those were the days when, if you owed any one forty shillings, you were served with writs charging you with having committed a certain trespass, to wit at Brentford, being in the company of Job Doe (not always _John_ Doe); with “that having no settled abode, you had been lurking and wandering about as a vagabond;” with that (this was in the Exchequer) “out of deep hatred and malice to the body politic, you had kept our sovereign lord the king from being seised of a certain sum, to wit, two millions of money, for which it was desirable to escheat the sum of forty shillings towards the use of our sovereign and suffering lord aforesaid.” In the declaration, it was set forth, that you had gone with sticks and staves, and assaulted and wounded divers people; and the damages were laid at 10,000_l._, of which the plaintiff was reasonable enough to claim only the moderate sum of forty shillings. The capias took you at once for any sum exceeding 2_l._, and you had to find and justify bail, if you did not wish to pine in a spunging-house, or rot in the Fleet. These were the days, not quite five thousand, and some of them not quite one hundred and fifty years ago, when criminal indictments were drawn in Latin, and Norman-French was an important part of legal education (see Pope and Swift’s _Miscellanies_, “Stradling _versus_ Styles”), and prisoners were brought up on habeas laden with chains. See Layer’s case in the _State Trials_, Lord Campbell’s agreeable condensation in the _Lives of the Chief Justices_. Layer was a barrister, a man of birth and education, but was implicated in an abortive Jacobite plot. His chains were of such dreadful weight, that he could sleep only on his back. He was suffering from an internal complaint, and pathetically appealed to Pratt, C.J., who was suffering from a similar ailment, to order his irons to be taken off,