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ENGLISH HUMOURISTS.
traitor, tyrant, hypocrite, that his wit and experience, both large in this matter, could enable him to devise or depict; he accompanies this villain through all the actions of his life, with a grinning deference and a wonderful mock respect: and doesn't leave him, till he is dangling at the gallows, when the satirist makes him a low bow and wishes the scoundrel good day.
It was not by satire of this sort, or by scorn and contempt, that Hogarth achieved his vast popularity and acquired his reputation.[1] His art is quite simple,[2]
- ↑ Coleridge speaks of the "beautiful female faces" in Hogarth's pictures, "in whom," he says, "the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet."—The Friend.
- ↑ "I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who, being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered 'Shakspeare: being asked which he esteemed next best, replied 'Hogarth.' His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at—his prints we read. . . . . . .
"The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture would almost unvulgarise every subject which he might choose. . . . .
"I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, Some in their nature repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,—they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the circumstances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that tedium quotidianarum formaram, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett and Fielding."—Charles Lamb.
"It has been observed that Hogarth's pictures are exceedingly unlike
