ething to be learnt from them), his
humorous scenes,--are they such as merely to disgust and set us
against our species?

The confident assertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr.
Barry to have been, have that weight of authority in them which
staggers at first hearing, even a long preconceived opinion. When I
read his pathetic admonition concerning the shortness of life, and
how much better the little leisure of it were laid out upon "that
species of art which is employed about the amiable and the
admirable;" and Hogarth's "method," proscribed as a "dangerous or
worthless pursuit," I began to think there was something in it; that
I might have been indulging all my life a passion for the works of
this artist, to the utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense; but
my first convictions gradually returned, a world of good-natured
English faces came up one by one to my recollection, and a glance at
the matchless _Election Entertainment_, which I have the happiness to
have hanging up in my parlor, subverted Mr. Barry's whole theory in
an instant.

In that inimitable 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 genius 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 partaking
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 personae; when he shall have done wondering 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
flings into the heap when it has already done enough,