The Bacchanalians, or, A midnight modern conversation a poem address'd to the ingenious Mr. Hogarth / [graphic][March 1732]engThe image is a copy of Hogarth's Midnight modern Conversation: A scene in a paneled room (in a public house?) with eleven men seated around a table in the center of which is a large punch-bowl decorated with Chinese figures. Wine bottles litter the floor and piled high on the mantelpiece. In the right corner a chamber pot overflows. One man in the foreground has fallen backwards off his chair; as he lands prostrate on the floor, one of his intoxicated companions staggers toward him, oblivious to the fact that his wine is spilling out over the prostrate man's head. The longcase clock shows the time as 4:00. See Paulson for suggested identities of the men depictedTitle engraved below image. Text etched on separate plate and mounted below.Poem in four columns: Sacred to thee, permit this, lay, Thy labour, Hogarth, to display! ...Cf. Paulson, R. Hogarth's graphic works (3rd ed.), no. 128.