Explanation: A hungry tigress who, when she has traversed the wood in fruitless search, sees within the reach of her claws a lamb and prepares to leap on her prey.
Answer: These are some satiric expressions that have been chosen from Henry Fielding’s outstanding prose satire, Joseph Andrews. Here, Fielding very bitterly presents the savages and brutalities of Mrs. Slipslop that she applies upon the simple Joseph.
As a hungry hound, Mrs. Slipslop jumps upon Joseph to prey on him and satisfy her lust. However, she is in her forty-five, and she is full of demands that the author has compared with the hunger of a fasting tigress. In Joseph Andrews, she appears as an embodiment of typical and individual qualities. She is the personification of unreasonable lust, affectation of gentility that she does not possess in reality, of coarseness and selfishness. Her appearance is quite repulsive as Fielding narrates her nose as likewise too long and her eyes as too little. She entertains a lustful passion for the handsome youth Joseph. Her attempted seduction of Joseph is a parody of Lady Booby’s efforts in the same direction. She launched on him forgetting her age and stage in society. The mock-heroic simile is as amusing as it is appropriate for her characterization that lays bare in the above-mentioned lines.
Finally, we should conclude by saying that Mrs. Slipslop is an embodiment of lust and sexual depression who becomes blind to fulfill it at any rate forgetting what should be right and what should be wrong.