and ravenous dog is stealing.  There is no defect of invention, no superfluity of detail, no purposeless stroke in this “owre true tale.”  From first to last it progresses steadily to its catastrophe by a forward march of skilfully linked and fully developed incidents.  It is like a novel of Fielding on canvas; and it seems inconceivable that, with this magnificent work en evidence, the critics of that age should have been contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that “as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit,” and to cackle the foot-rule criticisms of the Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance of composition.  But so it was.  Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1814, was it thoroughly understood how excellent and individual both as a designer and a colourist was this native artist, whom “Picture-dealers, Picture-cleaners, Picture-frame-makers, and other Connoisseurs”—­to use his own graphically ironical words—­had been allowed to rank below the third-rate copyists of third-rate foreigners.

Beyond the remark that the “jaded morning countenance” of the Viscount in Scene II. “lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as anything in Ecclesiastics,” Lamb’s incomparable essay in The Reflector makes no material reference to Marriage A-la-Mode.  His comments, besides, are confined to the engravings.  But Hazlitt, who saw the pictures in the above-mentioned exhibition in 1814, devotes much of his criticism to the tragedy of the Squanderfields, chiefly, it would seem, because Lamb had left the subject untouched.  Hazlitt’s own studies as an artist, his keen insight and his quick enthusiasm, made him a memorable critic of Hogarth, whose general characteristics he defines with admirable exactitude.  Much quotation has made his description of the young Lord and Counsellor Silvertongue sufficiently familiar.  But he is equally good in his vignette of the younger woman in the episode at the Quack Doctor’s, a creation which he rightly regards as one of Hogarth’s most successful efforts.  “Nothing,” he says, “can be more striking than the contrast between the extreme softness of her person and the hardened indifference of her character.  The vacant stillness, the docility to vice, the premature suppression of youthful sensibility, the doll-like mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to have no other feeling but a sickly sense of pain—­show the deepest insight into human nature, and into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which it has been good-naturedly asserted that ’vice loses half its evil in losing all its grossness.’” In the death of the Countess, again, he speaks thus of two of the subordinate characters:—­“We would particularly refer to the captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the apothecary, whose face and figure are constructed on exact physiognomical principles, and to the fine example of passive obedience, and non-resistance in the servant, whom he is taking to