wide-cuffed coat is light blue, his vest is loaded with embroidery.  He wears an enormous solitaire, and has high red heels to his shoes.  Before him, in happy parody of the ill-matched pair, are two dogs in coupling-links:—­the bitch sits up, alert and curious, her companion is lying down.  The only other figure is that of an old lawyer, who, with a plan in his hand, and a gesture of contempt or wonder, looks through an open window at an ill-designed and partly-erected building, in front of which several idle servants are lounging or sitting.  Like Pope’s “Visto,” the Earl has “a taste,” and his taste, interrupted for the moment by lack of funds, is the ruinous one of bricks and mortar.

The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirize the fashion of the time.  The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl’s ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly.  A cannon explodes below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right hand, notwithstanding his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the thunderbolt of Jupiter. Judith and Holofernes, St. Sebastian, The Murder of Abel, David and Goliath, The Martyrdom of St. Laurence, are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note, belong to those “dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental,” against which we have already heard the painter inveigh.  Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is Pharaoh in the Red Sea.  From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment.  Hogarth has used a similar idea in the Strolling Actresses, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the part of Diana.

In the picture of the Contract, the young people and “Counsellor Silvertongue,” as he has been christened by the artist, are placed in close proximity.  These are the real actors in the drama.  Building immemor sepulcri, the old earl had but few years to live.  Henceforth he is seen no more; and the alderman reappears only at the end of the story....

We have only dealt briefly with these concluding pictures, the decorations and accessories of which are to the full as minute and effective as those of the one that precede them.  The furniture of the bagnio, with its portrait of Moll Flanders humorously continued by the sturdy legs of a Jewish soldier in the tapestry Judgment of Solomon behind, the half-burned candle flaring in the draught of the open door and window, the reflection of the lantern on the ceiling and the shadow of the tongs on the floor, the horror-stricken look on the mask of the lady and the satanic grin on that of her paramour, all deserve notice.  So do the gross Dutch pictures in the alderman’s house, the sordid pewter plates and the sumptuous silver goblet, the stained table-cloth, the egg in rice, and the pig’s head which the half-starved