of that annoyed patrician, whom the
license of the time has seated next him?

I can see nothing "dangerous" in the contemplation of such scenes as
this, or the _Enraged Musician_, or the _Southwark Fair_, or twenty
other pleasant prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in
which the restless activities, the diversified bents and humors, the
blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather
than their "vices and follies," are held up in a laughable point of
view. All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency.
There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills
Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and
cherishes it. What heart was ever made the worse by joining in a
hearty laugh at the simplicities of Sir Hugh Evans or Parson Adams,
where a sense of the ridiculous mutually kindles and is kindled by a
perception of the amiable? That tumultuous harmony of singers that
are roaring out the words, "The world shall bow to the Assyrian
throne," from the opera of _Judith_, in the third plate of the series
called the _Four Groups of Heads_; which the quick eye of Hogarth
must have struck off in the very infancy of the rage for sacred
oratorios in this country, while "Music yet was young;" when we have
done smiling at the deafening distortions, which these tearers of
devotion to rags and tatters, these takers of heaven by storm, in
their boisterous mimicry of the occupation of angels, are
making,--what unkindly impression is left behind, or what more of
harsh or contemptuous feeling, than when we quietly leave Uncle Toby
and Mr. Shandy riding their hobby-horses about the room? The
conceited, long-backed Sign-painter, that with all the self-applause
of a Raphael or Correggio, (the twist of body which his conceit has
thrown him into has something of the Correggiesque in it,) is
contemplating the picture of a bottle, which he is drawing from an
actual bottle that hangs beside him, in the print of _Beer
Street_,--while we smile at the enormity of the self-delusion, can we
help loving the good-humor and self-complacency of the fellow? would
we willingly wake him from his dream?

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 natures repulsive, and only made
interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the
painter; but I contend th