The great success of the _Harlot’s Progress_ had naturally incited William Hogarth with a strong and almost fierce desire to accomplish some other work of the same satirical force, of the same breadth of morality with that excellent performance. He determined that there should be on record a sequel, or at least a pendant to the drama whose lamentable action his pencil had just so poignantly narrated. He felt that it was in him, that it was his vocation, his duty to follow step by step the career of human vice, to point, with unerring finger whither tend the crooked roads, to demonstrate as clearly as ever did mathematician—much more explicitly than ever did logician—that as surely as the wheels of the cart follow the hoofs of the horse, so surely will punishment follow sin. He was as yet but at the commencement of his trilogy: Clytemnestra might begin; Orestes might succeed; but the Eumenides had to come at last. He saw before him a whole ocean, seething, weltering, bubbling of pravities and impostures, and deadly lies, and evil passions. He heard the thorns crackling under the pot. He saw vice, not only stalking about with hungered looks, ragged garb and brandished bludgeon; now robbing Dr. Mead’s chariot in Holborn; now stopping the Bristol mail; now cutting Jonathan Wild’s throat on the leads before the Sessions House, and being pressed to death for it; now with sooty face and wild disguise of skins, stealing deer in the king’s forests, and rioting in caves on surreptitious venison and smuggled Nantz;[18] now being ducked for pocket-picking in the horse-pond behind the King’s Mews, Charing Cross; now cutting throats in night-cellars; now going filibustering, and suffering death for piracy, to be afterwards gibbeted at Halfway Creek and the Triptoptrees; but Vice in embroidery and Mechlin lace, with a silver-hilted sword, and a snuff-box enamelled by Rouquet, at its side; vice, painted and patched, whispering over fans, painted with Hogarth’s own “Progress” at Heidegger’s masquerade; vice punting at the “Young Man’s,” stock-jobbing in the Alley, brawling with porters and common bullies at the Rose, chaffering with horse-jockeys at Newmarket, clustered round the Cock-pit, applauding Broughton the ex-yeoman of the guard, pugilist, and lending its fine Holland shirt to Mr. Figg the prize-fighter after a bout at back or broadsword,[19] dancing attendance on the impudent and ugly German women, for whom the kings of England forsook their lawful wives, duelling in Hyde Park, and taking bribes in the very lobby of the Parliament House. William Hogarth knew that he was enjoined to mark this duplex vice, to burn it in the hand, to force it into the pillory, to pile the hundredweights of his indignation upon it in his own pressyard, to scathe and strangle it, and hang it as high as Haman, to be the loathing and the scorn of better-minded men. Between the summer lodgings at South Lambeth and other lodgings he took at