By way of contrast to the former chapter, and in imitation of the late ingenious Mr Hay; having dismissed all my beauties in my former chapter, I have now plenty of room for frights of every class. But to put my fair readers a little in good humour, and reconcile them to the disagreeable portraits on the other side, I shall remind them of the advantages that may be derived from ugliness, or even deformity, in its superlative degree. Look around the world and examine how few women have, in any degree, approached to happiness by road of beauty; and how many, far many more, have been ruined by a fine face. In the most elevated ranks of life, a fine woman no sooner appears upon horizon of gaiety, than she is surrounded, nay pestered by the fops and witlings of the day. If she has a large fortune to recommend her to a good match, she may, perhaps, marry a man of rank, with a broken constitution and a vitiated taste, who may, probably, pay her some assiduities for a few weeks, and then think, that having conferred a title on her, he has sufficiently counterbalanced her fortune, which may in a great measure be anticipated by gaming debts, mortgages and annuities. Finding herself thus slighted by the man whom she listened to for the sake of a coronet only, her vanity is hurt at his coolness, and she resolves upon retaliation the very first opportunity, perhaps with her groom or her hairdresser. A divorce soon ensues, as his Lordship finds another fortune convenient, if not necessary. Her Ladyship is true, may now roam at large; but then she is contemned and despised by the virtuous and sensible part of her own sex, and treated with indignity by every man, who fancies he has a right to participate of her charms, after she has thus publicly recorded herself a prostitute. To a woman of sensibility and delicate feelings, this state must be hardly supportable; as at times, in spite of all her levity, she must endure such reflections, as will be too pungent for any female entirely lost to all shame.

            But view a pretty female at the dawn of beauty, exposed to all the artifices of seduction, all the wiles of pimps and pandars. Without friends to protect or advise her; without a fortune to secure her a husband; with, perhaps, too much pride to condescend to a menial state; judging her beauty entitles her to rank with gentry, if not nobility; she falls an easy prey to vanity and ambition, and soon finds herself devoted to deformity and disease, the tyranny of bawds, and the outcast of society; at length, perhaps, doomed to pay the last debt of nature in a prison or a hospital. My frolicsome readers will, perhaps, think I am too grave upon the occasion, and moralise where I should amuse and entertain; I shall, therefore, terminate this chapter in a less sententious manner.

            As Hogarth has described the line of beauty to be a S, by a parity of descriptive reasoning, deformity may be typified by a Z, as the most crooked letter in the alphabet; and the scale of deformity will stand as follows.

            The ne plus ultra of deformity: or the last letter of the alphabet;

DEFORMED.
UGLY.
FORBIDDING.
UNCOUTH.
DISAGREEABLE.
AWKWARD.
UNMEANING.
PASSABLE.

            Amongst all my female acquaintances, I do not know one that does not think herself more than passable; I cannot therefore suppose that any lady whatever will lay claim to a niche in this gallery, though there is ample room for two-thirds of the female creation to have their busts with great propriety fixed here. But as we forbore to mortify any part of the fair sex, by giving them an inferior rank even in the scale of beauty; much less shall we carry impoliteness so far as to suggest to any individual, that even the ne plus ultra of deformity may with justice be filled by Miss ––, Lady ––, and many more self-created toasts of the age, notwithstanding the advantages we have so plainly pointed out arising from ugliness and deformity, in the first part of this chapter.

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