at occasion, the great soul
flashes out, and conquers transcendent. In thinking of the splendour of
Pope's young victories, of his merit, unequalled as his renown, I hail and
salute the achieving genius, and do homage to the pen of a hero.

Lecture The Fifth. Hogarth, Smollett, And Fielding

I suppose as long as novels last and authors aim at interesting their
public, there must always be in the story a virtuous and gallant hero, a
wicked monster his opposite, and a pretty girl who finds a champion;
bravery and virtue conquer beauty: and vice, after seeming to triumph
through a certain number of pages, is sure to be discomfited in the last
volume, when justice overtakes him and honest folks come by their own.
There never was perhaps a greatly popular story but this simple plot was
carried through it: mere satiric wit is addressed to a class of readers
and thinkers quite different to those simple souls who laugh and weep over
the novel. I fancy very few ladies indeed, for instance, could be brought
to like _Gulliver_ heartily, and (putting the coarseness and difference of
manners out of the question) to relish the wonderful satire of _Jonathan
Wild_. In that strange apologue, the author takes for a hero the greatest
rascal, coward, 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.(143) His art is
quite simple,(144) he speaks popular parables to interest simple hearts
and to inspire them with pleasure or pity or warning and terror. Not one
of his tales but is as easy as _Goody Two Shoes_; it is the moral of Tommy
was a naughty boy and the master flogged him, and Jacky was a good boy and
had plum cake, which pervades the whole works of the homely and famous
English moralist. And if the moral is written in rather too large letters
after the fable, we must remember how simple the scholars and schoolmaster
both were, and like neither the less because they are so artless and
honest. "It was a maxim of Dr. Harrison's," Fielding says in _Amelia_,
speaking of the benevole