which these poets (in them chiefly showing themselves poets) are perpetually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject—­consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind have made us even to despair for our species, that there is such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly out—­refreshing admonitions, to which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity of the general satire.

And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth? nothing which “attempts and reaches the heart?”—­no aim beyond that of “shaking the sides?”—­If the kneeling ministering female in the last scene of the Rake’s Progress, the Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before, and have dared almost to parallel it with the most absolute idea of Virtue which Shakspeare has left us, be not enough to disprove the assertion; if the sad endings of the Harlot and the Rake, the passionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the adulterous wife is pouring forth to her assassinated and dying lord in the last scene but one of the Marriage Alamode,—­if these be not things to touch the heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative tenderness:  is there nothing sweetly conciliatory in the mild patient face and gesture with which the wife seems to allay and ventilate the feverish irritated feelings of her poor poverty-distracted mate (the true copy of the genus irritabile), in the print of the Distrest Poet? or if an image of maternal love be required, where shall we find a sublimer view of it than in that aged woman in Industry and Idleness (plate V.) who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to her brutal vice-hardened child, whom she is accompanying to the ship which is to bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy:  in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute beast’s to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered, and feels it must belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of his country shall be suffered to continue to beat in it.  Compared with such things, what is Mr. Penny’s “knowledge of the figure and academical skill which Hogarth wanted?”

With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the congratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of “humor and caricatura,” in which it appears he was in danger of travelling side by side with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs. Hogarth knew her province better than, by disturbing her husband at his palette, to divert him from that universality of subject, which has stamped him perhaps, next to Shakspeare, the most inventive genius which this island has produced, into the “amiable pursuit of beautiful nature,” i.e., copying ad infinitum the individual charms and graces of Mrs. H.  “Hogarth’s method of exposing meanness, deformity, and vice, paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and vicious.”