Her courts

Stephen's allusive associations of the inflowing waters with women—Mary Ann's urination, the pregnancy suggested by the words of Paul and Ambrose, the gazes of "Licentious men" scorned by Kevin Egan—conclude with a final brief allusion that is itself allusive. The image of "a naked woman shining in her courts" appears to echo a passage about prostitutes in John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe (1682), which parodies a couplet by Abraham Cowley.

John Hunt 2016

The third painting of William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress (1733), held in Sir John Soane's Museum, London. Source: www.soane.org.

Indencency, a cartoon print by Isaac Cruikshank (1799). Source: Wikimedia Commons.