dy, of those elements of the man which were the real
source of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready
to say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually
overawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar. For
it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations
of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of
vocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the
present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of
the past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet,
delicate, refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes
of giants, such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray
note, you catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in
past literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished
[114] impressibility by the great effects in them. Reading, commenting
on Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy
sky, and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might
seem to be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he
analyses it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too
knows the secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into The Rake's Progress, or Marriage a la Mode, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless
in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things
picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different
age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of
cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to
preserve--we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them
the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its
more solemn and self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of
individuality which we find quite tolerable in persons, because they
convey to us the secret of lifelike expression, and with regard to
which we are all to some extent humourists. But it is part of the
privilege of the genuine humourist to anticipate this pensive mood with
regard to the ways and things [115] of his own day; to look upon the
tricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged
sort of visio