But he has done much more than this.  He has peopled his canvas with its dramatis personae,—­with vivid portraits of the more strongly-marked actors in that cynical and sensual, brave and boastful, corrupt and patriotic age.  Not, be it understood, with its Wolfes and Johnsons,—­he was a humourist and a satirist, and goodness was no game for his pencil,—­rather with its Lovats and Chartres, its Sarah Malcolms and its Shebbeares.  He was a moralist after the manner of eighteenth-century morality, not savage like Swift, not ironical like Fielding, not tender-hearted at times like Johnson and Goldsmith; but unrelenting, uncompromising, uncompassionate.  He drew vice and its consequences in a thoroughly literal and business-like way, neither sparing nor extenuating its details, wholly insensible to its seductions, incapable of flattering it even for a moment, preoccupied simply with catching its precise contortion of pleasure or of pain.  In all his delineations, as in that famous design of Prud’hon’s, we see Justice and Vengeance following hard upon the criminal....

A hint of the new series had already been given in the Battle of the Pictures, where the second scene, still inoffensively reposing upon the easel, is wantonly assaulted by a copy of the Aldobrandini Marriage.  In April following the set of engravings was issued, the subscription ticket being the etching of heads known as Characters and Caricaturas.  Plates I. and VI. were engraved by Scotin, Plates II. and III. by Baron, and Plates IV. and V. by Ravenet.  Exactly two years earlier, Hogarth had heralded them by the following notification in the London Daily Post, and General Advertiser of April 2nd, 1743: 

“Mr. HOGARTH intends to publish by Subscription, SIX PRINTS from Copper-Plates, engrav’d by the best Masters in Paris, after his own Paintings; representing a Variety of Modern Occurrences in High-Life, and called MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE.  Particular Care will be taken, that there may not be the least Objection to the Decency or Elegancy of the whole Work, and that none of the Characters represented shall be personal.”  Then follow the terms of subscription.  The last quoted lines are probably a bark at some forgotten detraction, and if not actually ironical, doubtless about as sincere as Fielding’s promise, in the Prologue to his first comedy, not to offend the ladies.  Those who had found inelegancy and indecency in the previous productions of the painter, would still discover the same defects in the masterpiece he now submitted to the public.  And although it may be said that the “characters” represented are not “personal” in a satirical sense, his precautions, as he himself tells us, “did not prevent a likeness being found for each head, for a general character will always bear some resemblance to a particular one.”