t. Not only this, but as his work was intended especially to
appeal to ordinary people, it is hardly to be expected that he would
express himself in terms other than might most quickly appeal to them.
His most famous works, indeed, were executed as well as designed for the
engraver, namely _The Harlot's Progress_, _The Rake's Progress_,
_Marriage a la Mode_, and _The Election_, each of which consisted of a
series of several minutely finished pictures. In portraiture he showed
finer qualities, it is true; but even in these he was thinking more of
getting the most out of his model, according to his forcible character,
than of any technical refinements for which he might be handed down to
posterity as a great painter.

It was easy enough for Reynolds to sneer at Hogarth for his vulgarity,
when he was trying to impress upon his pupils the importance of painting
in the grand style. "As for the various departments of painting," he
says in his third Discourse, "which do not presume to make such high
pretensions, they are many. None of them are without their merit, though
none enter into competition with this universal presiding idea of the
art. The painters who have applied themselves more particularly to low
and vulgar characters, and who express with precision the various shades
of passion as they are exhibited by vulgar minds (such as we see in the
works of Hogarth), deserve great praise; but as their genius has been
employed on low and confined subjects, the praise which we must give
must be as limited as its object." And yet it was in following an
example set by Hogarth in portrait painting that Reynolds gained his

[Illustration: PLATE XXXVIII.--WILLIAM HOGARTH

THE SHRIMP GIRL

_National Gallery, London_]

first success in that art. I mean the full-length portrait of Captain
Keppel, painted in 1752. This originality and boldness in disregarding
the tame but universal convention in posing the sitter was peculiarly
Hogarth's own. With him it amounted almost to perverseness. He would not
let anybody "sit" to him, if he could help it. When he did, as in the
portraits of Quinn, the actor, and Hoadly, Bishop of Winchester, in the
National Gallery, the result is not the happiest; for, with all their
force, these portraits lack the grace that a conventional pose requires
to render it acceptable in the terms of its convention. If a man must
put on the accepted evening dress of his time, he must see that it
conforms in the s