very error of the time. There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, extravagant, and ostentatious! Yet he is as little a caricaturist as he is a painter of still life. Criticism has not done him justice, though public opinion has. His works have received a sanction which it would be vain to dispute, in the universal delight and admiration with which they have been regarded, from their first appearance to the present moment. If the quantity of amusement, or of matter for reflection, which they have afforded, is that by which we are to judge of precedence among the intellectual benefactors of mankind, there are perhaps few persons who can put in a stronger claim to our gratitude than Hogarth. wonderful knowledge which he possessed of human life and manners is only to be surpassed (if it can be) by the powers of invention with which he has arranged his materials, and by the mastery of execution with which he has embodied and made tangible the very thoughts and passing movements of the mind. Some persons object to the style of Hogarth's pictures, or to the class to which they belong. First, Hogarth belongs to no class, or, if he belongs to any, it is to the same class as Fielding, Smollett,

The

Vanbrugh, and Molière. Besides, the merit of his pictures does not depend on the nature of his subjects, but on the knowledge displayed of them, in the number of ideas, in the fund of observation and amusement contained in them. Make what deductions you please for the vulgarity of the subjects-yet in the research, the profundity, the absolute truth and precision of the delineation of character,-in the invention of incident, in wit and humour, in life and motion, in everlasting variety and originality, -they never have been, and probably never will be, surpassed. They stimulate the faculties as well as amuse them. "Other pictures we see,

Hogarth's we read !"*

There is one error which has been frequently entertained on this subject, and which I wish to correct, namely, that Hogarth's genius was confined to the imitation of the coarse humours and broad farce of the lowest life. But he excelled quite as much in exhibiting the vices, the folly, and frivolity of the fashionable manners of his time. His fine ladies do not yield the palm of ridicule to his waiting-maids, and his lords and his porters are on a very respectable footing of equality. He is quite

See an admirable Essay on the Genius of Hogarth,' by Charles Lamb.

at home either in St Giles's or St James's. There is no want, for example, in his Marriage à la Mode, or his Taste in High Life, of affectation verging into idiotcy, or of languid sensibility that might

"Die of a rose in aromatic pain."

Many of Hogarth's characters would form admirable illustrations of Pope's Satires,' who was contemporary with him. In short, Hogarth was a painter of real, not of low life. He was, as we have said, a satirist, and consequently his pencil did not dwell on the grand and beautiful, but it glanced with equal success at the absurdities and peculiarities of high or low life, "of the great vulgar and the small."

To this it must be added, that he was as great a master of passion as of humour. He succeeded in low tragedy as much as in low or genteel comedy, and had an absolute power in moving the affections and rending the hearts of the spectators, by depicting the effects of the most dreadful calamities of human life on common minds and common countenances. Of this the Rake's Progress, particularly the Bedlam Scene, and many others are unanswerable proofs. Hogarth's merits as a mere artist are not confined to his prints. In general, indeed, this is the case. But when he chose to take

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pains, he could add the delicacies of execution and colouring in the highest degree to those of character and composition; as is evident in his series of pictures, all equally well painted, of the Marriage à la Mode.

I shall next speak of Wilson, whose landscapes may be divided into three classes,-his Italian landscapes, or imitations of the manner of Claude,—his copies of English scenery,—and his historical compositions. The first of these are, in my opinion, by much the best; and I appeal, in support of this opinion, to the Apollo and the Seasons, and to the Phaeton. The figures are of course out of the question (these being as uncouth and slovenly as Claude's are insipid and finical); but the landscape in both pictures is delightful. In looking at them we breathe the air which the scene inspires, and feel the genius of the place present to us. In the first, there is the cool freshness of a misty spring morning; the sky, the water, the dim horizon, all convey the same feeling. The fine gray tone and varying outline of the hills; the graceful form of the retiring lake, broken still more by the hazy shadows of the objects that repose on its bosom ; the light trees that expand their branches in the air, and the dark stone figure and mouldering temple, that contrast strongly with the

broad clear light of the rising day,-give a charm, a truth, a force, and harmony to this composition, which produce the greater pleasure the longer it is dwelt on. The distribution of light and shade resembles the effect of light on a globe. The Phaeton has the dazzling fervid appearance of an autumnal evening; the golden radiance streams in solid masses from behind the flickering clouds; every object is baked in the sun; the brown foreground, the thick foliage of the trees, the streams, shrunk and stealing along behind the dark high banks,-combine to produce that richness and characteristic unity of effect which is to be found only in nature, or in art derived from the study and imitation of nature. These two pictures, as they have the greatest general effect, are also more carefully finished than any other pictures I have seen of his.

In general, Wilson's views of English scenery want almost every thing that ought to recommend them. The subjects he has chosen are not well fitted for the landscape painter, and there is nothing in the execution to redeem them. Illshaped mountains, or great heaps of earth,-trees that grow against them without character or elegance, motionless waterfalls,-a want of relief, of transparency and distance, without the impos