serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the action, he shews you what (of a kindred nature) is passing beyond it. Close by the shell, in which, by direction of the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an old wall, which, partaking of the universal decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in some funeral procession which is passing by on the other side of the wall out of the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of the Painting of the Trojan War, in his Tarquin and Lucrece, has introduced a similar device, where the painter made a part stand for the whole : For much imaginary work was there, This he well calls Imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew every thing distinct and full, as they require an object to be made oat to themselves before they can comprebend it. When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say) sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone, and of that rage for classification, by which, in matters of taste at least, we are perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us concede to the work of Pousin above mentioned, and deny to Jan. 1814. this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition. We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one man a great historical painter, because he has saken for his subjects kings or great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and set him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shewn by the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from that very common life, a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call History. I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and classifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England. I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Ryenolds, whether in the countenances of his Staring and Grinning Despair, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be any thing comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his brokendown Rake in the last plate but one of the Rake's Progress, where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play " will not do." Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here ac The first face perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the Debauchee in the Second Plate of the Marriage Alamode, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as any thing in Ecclesiastes. - accumulated!-the long history of a mis spent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates before had told it: here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks which are to freeze the beholder, no grinning at the antique bed-posts, no face making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it, a final leave taken of hope,-the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,-a beginning alienation of mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together, matter to feed and fertilize the mind. It is too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it. When we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid in the one case in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and in the other in the State Prison of Pisa, or the bed-room of a Cardinal,—or that the subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is matter of history, so weigh down the real points of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to make choice of the other) with some thing like disgrace* ? Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his lectures, speaks of the presumption of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in pain ting by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects. Hogarth's excursions into the Holy Land were not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have expression, The Boys under Demoniacal Possession, of Raphael and Dominichino, by what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by strong mental agony, the frightful obstinate laugh of madness,-yetall so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this face. Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony. This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the honours of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for the two concluding scenes of the Rake's Progress, because of the Co mic of some sort or other in them,-the Child Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter, for instance, which is more than can be said of Sir Josuha Reynold's Repose in Egypt, painted for Macklin's Bible, where for a Madona he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But indeed the race of Vir gin Mary Painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch, at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant. It is the force of these kindly admixtures, which assimilates the scenes of Hogarth and of Shakspeare to the drama of real life, where no such thing as pure tragedy is to be found; but merriment and infelicity, ponderous crime and feather-light vanity, like twin-formed births, disagreeing complexions of one intexture, per petually unite to shew forth motley spectacles to the world. Then it is that the poet or painter shews his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts be chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to, his principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt, while the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, and the doggrel nonsence of the Cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, are pure, irrelevant, impertinent discords,—as bad as the quar relling dog and cat under the table of the Lord and his Disciples at Emmaus of Titian? Not to tire the reader with perpetual reference to prints which he may not be fortunate enough to possess, it may be sufficient to remark, that the same tragic cast of expression and incident, blended in some instances with a greater alloy of comedy, characterizes his other great work, the Marriage Alamode, as well as those less elaborate exertions of his genius, the prints called Industry and Idleness, the Distrest Poet, &c.; forming, with the Harlot's, and Rake's Progres sess, the most considerable, if not the largest class of his production-enough surely to rescue Hogarth from the imputation of being a mere buffoon, or one whose general aim was only to shake the sides. There remains a very numerous class of his performances, the object of which must be confessed to be principally comic. But in all of them will be found something to distinguish them from the droll productions of Bunbury and others. They have this difference, that we do not merely laugh at, we are led into long trains of reflection by them. In this repect they resemble the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims, which have strokes of humour in them enough to designate them for the most part as comic, but our strongest feeling still is wonder at the comprehensiveness of genius which could crowd, as poet and painter have done, into one small canvas, so many diverse yet co-operating materials. The faces of Hogarth have not a mere momentary interest, as in caricatures, or those grotesque physiognomies which we sometimes catch a glance of in the street, and, struck with their whimsicality, wish for a pencil and the power to sketch them down, and forget them again as rapidly, but they are permanent, abiding ideas. Not the sports of Na Nature, but her necessary eternal classes. We feel that we cannot part with any of them, lest a link should be broken. It is worthy of observation, that he has seldom drawn a mean or insignificant countenance*. Hogarth's mind was eminently reflective; and, as it has been well observed of Shakspeare, that he has transfused his own poetical character into the persons of his drama (they are all more or less poets.) Hogarth has impressed a thinking character upon the persons of his can vas. This remark must not be taken universally. The exquisite idiotism of the little gentleman in the bag and sword beating his drum in the print of the Enraged Musician, would of itself rise up against so sweeping an assertion. But I think it will be found to be true of the generality of his countenances. The knife-grinder and Jew flute-player in the plate just mentioned may serve as instances instead of a thousand. They have intense thinking faces, though the purpose to which they are subservient by no means required it; but indeed it seems as if it was painful to Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insig nificance. This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the faces of his characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth so much more than those of any other artist are objects of meditation. Our intellectual natures love the mirror which gives them back their own likenesses. The mental eye If there are any of that description, they are in his Strolling Players, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford as the richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know, in the mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably poor and wan. ting; it is perhaps the only one of his performances at which we have a right to feel disgusted. will not bend long with delight upon vacancy. "Ho Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the most unpromising subjects seems never wholly to have deserted him. garth himself," says Mr. Coleridget, from whom I have borrowed this observation, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, than this effect occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces as the central figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group, a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter; and thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature, or the foibles or humours of our fellowmen, from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred.” To the beautiful females in Hogarth, which Mr. C. has pointed out, might be added the frequent introduction of children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular delight in) into his pieces. They have a singular effect in giving tranquillity and a portion of their own innocence to the subject. The Baby riding in its mother's lap in the March to Finchley (its careless innocent face placed directly behind the intriguing time-fur + The Friend, No. XVI. rowed rowed countenance of the treason-plot ting French priest) perfectly sobers the whole of that tumultuous scene. The Boy Mourner winding up his top with so much unpretending insensibility in the plate of the Harlot's Funeral, (the only thing in that as sembly that is not a hypocrite) quiets and sooths the mind that has been disturbed at the sight of so much depraved man and woman-kind. In his inimitable Election print, (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more known and celebrated March to Finchley, as the best Comedy exceeds the best Farce that ever was written,) let a person look till he be saturated; and when he has done wondering at the inventiveness of genins which could bring so many characters (more than thirty distinct classes of face) into a room, and set them down at table together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural a manner, engage them in so many easy sets and occupations, yet all partak ing of the spirit of the occasion which brought them together, so that we feel that nothing but an election time could have assembled them; having no central figure or principal group, (for the hero of the piece, the Candidate, is properly set aside in the levelling indistinction of the day, one must look for him to find him) nothing to detain the eye from passing from part to part, where every part is alike instinct with life,-for here are no furniture-faces, no figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all dramatis persona: when he shall have done won. dering at all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the finest miniature; when he shall have done admiring the numberless appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles which rich genius dings into the heap when it has already done enough, the over measure which it delights in giving, as if it felt its stores were exhaustless; the dumb rhetoric of the scenery-for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth, are living and significant things; the witticisms that are expressed by words, (all artists but Hogarth have failed when they have endeavoured to combine two mediums of expression, and have introduced words into their pictures,) and the unwritten numberless little allusive pleasantries that are scattered about ; the work that is going on in the scene, and beyond it, as is made visible to the "eye of mind," by the mob which choaks up the door-way, and the sword that has forced an entrance before its master: when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the result left on his mind, Is it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of his species? or is not the general feeling which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly upon his mind, a kindly one in favour of his species? was not the general air of the scene wholesome? did it do the heart hurt to be anong it? Something of a riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of the faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling so much good company together: but is not the general cast of expression in the faces, of the good sort? do they not seem cut out of the good old rock, substantial English honesty? would one fear treachery among characters of their expression? or shall we call their honest mirth and seldomreturning relaxation by the hard names of vice and profligacy? That poor country fellow, that is grasping his staff, (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came into the room,) and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fill all the ca pacities |