ne of the earliest literary renderings of the uncharitable Evangelical shrew - a figure made definitive in the comic Miss Miggs (Barnaby Rudge) and the tragic Mrs. Clennam (Little Dorrit) - seems to have originated with a Catholic observer, no doubt facilitated by a sense of detachment in such matters: Here stood Ill-nature like an ancient Maid, Her Form in Black and White array'd; With store of Pray'rs, for Mornings, Nights, and Noons, Her Hand is fill'd; her Bosom with Lampoons. (The Rape of the Lock, Canto 4, ll. 27-30) William Hogarth soon afterwards provided additional accretions to this vignette from The Rape of the Lock in both his painting and print of Morning, the first of The Four Times of Day. The oil might have modified Ill-Nature's puritanical monochrome into honeyed satins, but she becomes subfusc once again in her print avatar, which would in any case have enjoyed an altogether wider circulation. Both painting and print, like Pope's thumbnail, convey the spite and envy of sexual frustration through a spareness of figure, implicit in the datum of the wrinkled Form, since plump people don't line as readily as thin ones, forcing upon socialites in one of David Leavitt's fictions a disquieting choice between face and figure. Following Pope, Hogarth also externalizes the evidence of prayer, which is set in opposition to an inner meanness fuelled by sexual jealousy and a sense of deprivation. Ill-nature carries her orisons in propria manu, but Hogarth's spinster (for such she seems to be) delegates the portage of her prayerbook to a frost-bitten footboy. Barnaby Rudge places Miss Miggs firmly within this anti- apostolic succession of Evangelical shrews, and so do the illustrations with which Browne invested it. Dickens stresses the bony, uncontoured nature of her physiognomy - This Miggs was a tall young lady, very much addicted to