Focus on this artwork and discuss the Inscription.
The print was accompanied by a second sheet of the same size with a lengthy inscription detailing Hogarth's motives for creating the piece. In a letter to Hogarth, a correspondent identified only as "B" noted that the print seemed of minor importance compared to the inscription, indeed it was the only written work that Hogarth released under his own name after the completion of The Analysis of Beauty; Paulson suggests it may have been a rejected passage from that book, and Trusler, a nineteenth-century commentator on Hogarth, goes as far as to wrongly attribute the inscription as an excerpt from chapter six.
Text of the inscription:
The Analysis of Beauty