task, and whose coat of green and yellow livery is as long and melancholy as his face.  The disconsolate look, the haggard eyes, the open mouth, the comb sticking in the hair, the broken gapped teeth, which, as it were, hitch in an answer—­everything about him denotes the utmost perplexity and dismay.”  Some other of Hazlitt’s comments are more fanciful, as, for example, when he compares Lady Squanderfield’s curl papers (in the “Toilet Scene”) to a “wreath of half-blown flowers,” and those of the macaroni-amateur to “a chevaux-de-frise of horns, which adorn and fortify the lack-lustre expression and mild resignation of the face beneath.”  With his condemnation of the attitude of the husband, in the scene at the “Turk’s Head Bagnio,” as “one in which it would be impossible for him to stand, or even fall,” it is difficult to coincide; and it is an illustration of the contradictions of criticism that this very figure should have been selected for especial praise, with particular reference to the charges made against the painter of defective drawing, by another critic who was not only as keenly sympathetic as Hazlitt, but was probably a better anatomist—­the author of Rab and his Friends.

To Hazlitt’s general estimate of Hogarth we shall not now refer.  But his comparison of Hogarth and Wilkie may fairly be summarized in this place, because it contains so much excellent discrimination of the former.  Wilkie, Hazlitt contends, is a simple realist; Hogarth is a comic painter.  While one is a “serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts,” the other is a moral satirist, “exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view, and, with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners in all their tendencies, combinations, and contrasts....  He is carried away by a passion for the ridiculous.  His object is not so much ‘to hold the mirror up to nature’ as ’to show vice her own feature, scorn her own image.’  He is so far from contenting himself with still-life that he is always on the verge of caricature, though without ever falling into it.  He does not represent folly or vice in its incipient, or dormant, or grub state; but full-grown, with wings, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, ostentatious, and extravagant....  There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities—­a tilt and tournament of absurdities; the prejudices and caprices of mankind are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden.  Hogarth paints nothing but comedy or tragi-comedy.  Wilkie paints neither one nor the other.  Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect.  Wilkie never looks at any object but to see that it is there....  In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing at the unaccountable jumble of odd things which are brought together; you look at Wilkie’s pictures with a mingled feeling of curiosity and admiration at the accuracy of the representation.”  The distinction thus drawn is, in the main, a just one.  Yet, at certain points, Wilkie comes nearer to Hogarth than any other English artist; and that elegant amateur, Sir George Howland Beaumont, reasoned rightly when he judged the painter of The Village Politicians to be, in his day, the only fit recipient of Hogarth’s mahl-stick.