plation of poverty and all its concomitants. Added thereto was the peculiar interest in the artist's name, which resulted to Dickens from his marriage at the age of twenty-four with Miss Hogarth, this lady claiming descent from her great namesake. Both men were strenuous moralists, but it would be hard to show any other point of resemblance in their methods of presenting fact. As to their humour, I am unable to find anything in Hogarth which can for a moment be compared with that quality in Dickens. Hogarth smiles, it is true, but how grimly! There prevails in him an uncompromising spirit of which the novelist had nothing whatever. Try to imagine a volume of fiction produced by the artist of Gin Lane, of The Harlot's Progress, and put it beside the books which, from Pickwick onwards, have been the delight of English homes. Puritans both of them, Hogarth shows his religion on the sterner side; Dickens, in a gentle avoidance of whatsoever may give offence to the pure in heart, the very essence of his artistic conscience being that compromise which the other scorned. In truth, as artists they saw differently. Dickens was no self-deceiver; at any moment his steps would guide him to parts of London where he could behold, and had often beheld,
