gladdened by humor,--all who are pleased with
judicious and well-directed satire,--all who are charmed with the
ludicrous looks of popular folly, and all who can be moved with the
pathos of human suffering, are admirers of Hogarth." But to our
thinking; Hogarth had a calling even more elevated than the Scottish
poet has given him in this eloquent summing-up of his attributes; "he is
one of our greatest teachers--a TEACHER to whom is due the _highest_
possible honor; and the more we feel the importance of the teacher, the
more we value those who teach well. In grappling with folly and in
combating with crimes, he was compelled to reveal the nature of that he
proposed to satirize; he was obliged to set up sin in its high place
before he could crown it with infamy." The times were full of internal
as well as foreign disturbance, and Hogarth's studio was no hermitage to
exclude passing events or their promoters. He lived with the living,
moving _present_,--his engravings being his pleasures; portraits, as
they are now to many a high-hearted man of talent, his means of
subsistence; heavy weights of mortality that fetter and clog the
ascending spirit.

His controversies and encounters with the worthless Wilkes,--his defence
of his own theories,--his determined dislike to the establishment of a
Royal Academy--his various other controversies--rendered his exciting
course very different from that of the lonely artists of the present
day, who are but too fond of living in closed studios, "pouring," as
Hogarth would have said,--"pouring wine from one vessel into
another,"--pondering over tales and poems for inspiration, and
transcribing the worn-out models of many seasons into attitudes of
bounding and varied life! Is it not wonderful, as sad, that the artist
will not feel his power, will not take his own place, assume his high
standing as of old, and demand the duty of respect from the world by the
just exercise of his glorious privilege! "Entertainment and information
are not all the mind requires at the hand of an artist; we wish to be
elevated by contemplating what is noble,--to be warmed, by the presence
of the heroic,--and charmed and made happy by the light of purity and
loveliness. We desire to share in the lofty movements of fine minds--to
have communion with their image of what is godlike, and to take a part
in the rapture of their love, and in the ecstasies of all their musings.
This is the chief end of high poetry, of