A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatized would be apt to imagine that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but subjects of the coarsest and most repulsive nature.  That his imagination was naturally unsweet, and that he delighted in raking into every species of moral filth.  That he preyed upon sore places only, and took a pleasure in exposing the unsound and rotten parts of human nature:—­whereas, with the exception of some of the plates of the Harlot’s Progress, which are harder in their character than any of the rest of his productions (the Stages of Cruelty I omit as mere worthless caricatures, foreign to his general habits, the offspring of his fancy in some wayward humor), there is scarce one of his pieces where vice is most strongly satirized, in which some figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest satisfied; a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good-humoredness and carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, yet enough to give a relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, and keep the general air from tainting.  Take the mild, supplicating posture of patient Poverty in the poor woman that is persuading the pawnbroker to accept her clothes in pledge, in the plate of Gin Lane, for an instance.  A little does it, a little of the good nature overpowers a world of bad.  One cordial honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely clears the atmosphere that was reeking with the black putrefying breathings of a hypocrite Blifil.  One homely expostulating shrug from Strap warms the whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingratitude from his friend Random had begun to freeze.  One “Lord bless us!” of Parson Adams upon the wickedness of the times, exorcises and purges off the mass of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could cull out and rake together.  But of the severer class of Hogarth’s performances, enough, I trust, has been said to show that they do not merely shock and repulse; that there is in them the “scorn of vice” and the “pity” too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive the sense of moral beauty; the “lacrymae rerum,” and the sorrowing by which the heart is made better.  If they be bad things, then is satire and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations:  let us

  “——­wink, and shut our apprehensions up
  From common sense of what men were and are:” 

let us make believe with the children, that everybody is good and happy; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.

But that larger half of Hogarth’s works, which were painted more for entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of his mind that there is always something to be learnt from them), his humorous scenes,—­are they such as merely to disgust and set us against our species?