poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little
circumstance may serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures,
which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the
action, he shows 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,
Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
That for Achilles' image stood his spear,
Grip'd in an armed hand; himself behind
Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind:
A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
Stood for the whole to be imagined."

[Footnote 1: At the late Mr. Hope's, in Cavendish Square]

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 show everything distinct and full, as they
require an object to be made out to themselves before they can
comprehend 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 Poussin above
mentioned, and deny to this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious
composition.

We are forever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call
one man a great historical painter, because he has taken 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 shown by th