Hogarth's
pictures, "in whom," he says, "the satirist never extinguished that
love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet."--_The Friend._

144 "I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who, being asked which
book he esteemed most in his library, answered, 'Shakespeare': being
asked which he esteemed next best, replied 'Hogarth'. His graphic
representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful,
suggestive meaning of _words_. Other pictures we look at--his prints
we read....

"The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture
would almost unvulgarize every subject which he might choose....

"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 nature repulsive, and only made
interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the
painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling
of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and
disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides,
that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,--they
give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which
escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the circumstances of
the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that
_taedium quotidianarum formarum_, which an unrestricted passion for
ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in
many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett
and Fielding."--CHARLES LAMB.

"It has been observed that Hogarth's pictures are exceedingly unlike
any other representations of the same kind of subjects--that they
form a class, and have a character, peculiar to themselves. It may
be worth while to consider in what this general distinction
consists.

"In the first place, they are, in the strictest sense, _historical_
pictures; and if what Fielding says be true, that his novel of _Tom
Jones_ ought to be regarded as an epic prose-poem, because it
contained a regular development of fable, manners, character, and
passion, the compositions of Hogarth, will, in like manner, be found
to have a higher claim to the title of epic pictures than