A pen and brown ink and wash preparatory drawing for the ninth engraving in a set of prints from Samuel Butler's Hudibras. Incised and stained.

Samuel Butler's Hudibras, published in 1662, is a lengthy poem satirising the hypocrisy of Puritanism during the English Civil War. In the eighteenth century it was often seen as an English counterpart to Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote. Hogarth was attracted to its satire of religious fanaticism and made two sets of prints depicting episodes from the story. This drawing is for the ninth print in the first set, created in the early 1720s, but not published until April 1726, and intended as book illustrations. A second series, intended as thirteen independent engravings, was published by Philip Overton in the spring of 1726.

The drawing shows a crowd scene, with Hudibras on a horse, encountering a rabble of people. The scene depicts a Skimmington, an old public shaming custom in rural England and Scotland, consisting of a procession ridiculing a 'nagging' wife or an unfaithful husband. Hogarth's seventeen designs for the earlier set largely followed the anonymous illustrations in a 1710 edition of the poem, and his later set was more ambitious in size and scope. A drawing for the same subject depicted in the later set of prints, is RCIN 913464. In total, the Royal Collection has six drawings relating to the later Hudibras series and one for the earlier set (RCINs 913459-65).