he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all.  But indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch, at the Reformation.  Our artists are too good Protestants to give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant.]

The Boys under Demoniacal Possession of Raphael and Domenichino, by what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene?  I am sure he is far more impressive than either.  It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget.  There is the stretch of human suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by strong mental agony, the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness,—­yet all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to them in this face.  Here are no tricks of distortion, nothing but the natural face of agony.  This is high tragic painting, and we might as well deny to Shakspeare the honors of a great tragedian, because he has interwoven scenes of mirth with the serious business of his plays, as refuse to Hogarth the same praise for the two concluding scenes of the Rake’s Progress, because of the Comic Lunatics[1] which he has thrown into the one, or the Alchymist that he has introduced in the other, who is paddling in the coals of his furnace, keeping alive the flames of vain hope within the very walls of the prison to which the vanity has conducted him, which have taught the darker lesson of extinguished hope to the desponding figure who is the principal person of the scene.

[Footnote 1: 
  “There are of madmen, as there are of tame,
  All humor’d not alike.  We have here some
  So apish and fantastic, play with a feather;
  And though ’twould grieve a soul to see God’s image
  So blemish’d and defac’d, yet do they act
  Such antick and such pretty lunacies,
  That, spite of sorrow, they will make you smile. 
  Others again we have, like angry lions,
  Fierce as wild bulls, untameable as flies.”
                                  Honest Whore.]