Note 15 — William Hogarth: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time.

One moment ere I leave the male and female naughtinesses in this drama for good. Charteris, Hackabout, brother and sister, James Dalton, the highwayman, whose “wig-box” you see in plate iii. of the H. P., and Mother Needham, who continued the traditions of Dryden’s Mother Dulake (“Wild Gallant”), to Foote’s Mother Cole, all faded into space before 1733. The colonel “Don Francisco”—as people with a snigger called Charteris—was very nearly being hanged. He was cast for death; but being immensely rich, and having, moreover, and luckily, a lord of the land, the Earl of Wemyss, for his son-in-law, he managed to escape. Not, indeed, Scot-free. He was compelled to make a handsome settlement on his victim, one Ann Bond, prosecutrix in the case for which Don Francisco had so close a riddance of “sus per coll” being written against his name. The sheriffs of London, and the high bailiff of Westminster, had, moreover, made a seizure of his rich goods and chattels, immediately after his conviction. He had to compound with them for the restitution of his effects, and this cost him nearly nine thousand pounds. The profligate old miser had to sell his South Sea stock, to raise the amount; a fact which the newspapers of the day record with much exultation. But Nemesis was not yet satisfied. The colonel’s wife came back from Scotland on purpose to reproach her lord. The wretched man on his part fled to Scotland, and died in Edinburgh soon afterwards. Dalton, of the “wig-box,” having been “boned,” “habbled,” or “snabbled,” and confined for some time in the “Rumbo,” or “Whid,” finished his career at the “nubbing cheat,” at the top of the Edgware Road. In other words—the first are the elegant terms used by the City marshal in his controversial pamphlet the Regulator, written in disparagement of Mr. Jonathan Wild the great—Mr. James Dalton was arrested, and after lying some time in Newgate, was duly tried, sentenced, and hanged. “He was a thief from his cradle, and imbibed the principles of his art with his mother’s milk.” He went between his father’s legs in the cart to his fatal exit at Tyburn. Sic itur ad astra; and thus Plutarch in the shape of the ordinary of Newgate. As for Mother Needham, she was sentenced to stand twice in the pillory. The first ordeal she underwent close to her own house, in Park Place, St. James’. She was very ill, and lay “all along” under these Caudine forks, “thus evading the law, which required that her face should be exposed.” Two days afterwards, “complaining of the ingratitude of the publick”—the mob had pelted her pitilessly—“and dreading the second pillorying to which, in Old Palace Yard, she was doomed, she gave up the ghost.”