But what, no doubt, interested his critical contemporaries even more than these preliminary protestations, was the painter’s promise to represent, in his new work, “a variety of modern occurrences in high-life.”  Here, it may be admitted, was a proposition which certainly savoured of temerity.  What could one whose pencil had scarcely travelled beyond the limits of St. Giles’s, know of the inner secrets of St. James’s?  A Hervey or a Beauclerk, or even a Fielding, might have sufficed; but a Hogarth of Leicester Fields, whose only pretence to distinction (as High Life conceives it) was that he had run away with Thornhill’s handsome daughter,—­what special title had he to depict that charmed region of cards and folly, ringed with its long-resounding knockers, and flambeau-carrying footmen!  This was, however, to reckon without genius, which over-leaps loftier barriers than these.  It is true that the English Novel of Manners, which has since stimulated so many artists, had only just made its appearance; and Pamela and Joseph Andrews but falteringly foreshadowed Clarissa and Tom Jones.  Yet there is nothing in the story of Marriage A-la-Mode which was beyond the powers of a spectator ab extra, always provided he were fairly acquainted with the Modelys and Wildairs of the stage, and the satires of Johnson and Pope.  The plot, like that of all masterpieces, is extremely simple.  An impoverished nobleman who marries his son to a rich citizen’s daughter; a husband who, pursuing his own equivocal pleasures, resigns his wife to the temptations of opportunity; a foregone sequel and a tragic issue:—­this material is of the oldest, and could make but slender claim to originality.  Submitted to Colman or Garrick as the scenario of a play for Yates and Mrs. Woffington, it would probably have been rejected as pitifully threadbare.  Yet combined and developed under the brush of Hogarth, set in an atmosphere that makes it as vivid as nature itself, decorated with surprising fidelity, and enlivened by all the resources of the keenest humour, it passes out of the line of mere transcripts of life, and, retaining the merits of the specific and particular, becomes a representative and typical work, as articulate to-day, as direct and unhesitating in its teaching, as it was when it was first offered to the world.

How well-preserved, even now, these wonderful pictures are!  It would almost seem as if Time, unreasoning in his anger, had determined to ignore in every way the audacious artist who treated him with such persistent indignity.  Look at them in the National Gallery.  Look, too, at the cracks and fissures in the Wilkies, the soiled rainbows of Turner,—­the bituminous riding-habit of Lady Douro in Sir Edwin’s Story of Waterloo.  But these paintings of William Hogarth are well-nigh as fresh to-day as when, new from the easel, they found their fortunate purchaser in Mr. Lane of Hillingdon.  They are not worked