I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the countenances of his Staring and Grinning Despair, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be anything comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the Rake’s Progress,[1] where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play “will not do?” Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated!—­the long history of a misspent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks, which are to freeze the beholder—­no grinning at the antique bedposts—­no face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept to a man’s self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it,—­a final leave taken of hope,—­the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,—­a beginning alienation of mind looking like tranquillity.  Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together,—­matter to feed and fertilize the mind.  It is too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it.  When we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid, in the one case, in our Fleet or King’s Bench Prison, and, in the other, in the State Prison of Pisa, or the bedroom of a cardinal,—­or that the subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is matter of history,—­so weigh down the real points, of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like disgrace?[2]

[Footnote 1:  The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression.  That which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded morning countenance of the debauchee in the second plate of the Marriage Alamode, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as anything in Ecclesiastes.]

[Footnote 2:  Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his Lectures, speaks of the presumption of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.  Hogarth’s excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have expression of some sort or other in them,—­the Child Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter, for instance:  which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Repose in Egypt, painted for Macklin’s Bible, where for a Madonna