that

-and the satirist should portray life and manners in such a way the whole exhibition should be subservient to a high-toned morality,have indeed professed to expose vicę, but have only succeeded in veiling it in the suggestive voluptuousness of the Coan robe. The dish presented, instead of being disgusting, is so palatable, so well seasoned with wit and graceful pleasantry, as to tempt the appetite by its piquancy, not to inspire it with loathing by the exhibition of its horrors. We say falsely called, for when the picture of human vice and folly is not made subservient to the establishment of a pure system of ethics, both practical and theoretical, the satirist, indeed, ceases to exist, but forth from his tomb there leaps the pander, who is alike ignorant of the spirit with which satire should be animated, the treatment with which it should be handled, the aspect in which it should be viewed, and the end to which it should be directed.

Hogarth has been sometimes charged with indelicacy, but he has been so because he has painted Vice in all her naked deformity, and has not, by refining away its horrors, rendered the potion, at the same time, more alluring and more deceptive; and, it may be well to call to mind, the more deceptive, the more fatal is the draught. Indelicate! Yes, truly, there are indelicacies in Hogarth that are caviare to impure minds, but to them alone. The man who finds these grievous charges supported by Hogarth's plates must, undoubtedly, if to his other faults he add not inconsistency, condemn, in his "Index Expurgatorius," the Book of Genesis as more dangerous than "the Harlot's Progress," and place upon the shelf with Tommy Little's "Poems," the Song of Solomon, and "The Rape of Lucrece." Away, then, with this charge of impurity, and let it strike with increased virulence upon those impure minds from whom the pestilential stream first issued, and whose only object seems to be to find in all and everything that crosses their baneful path some breach of chastity, some violation of the rules of delicacy, wherewith to lend a flavour to a dish too insipid, because too pure, for their sensual and depraved imaginings. Let this be our answer to one class of objectors, -a class who, being ignorant of virtue, either confound it with vice, or adopt as their criterion the decision of some coterie of antiquated scandal-loving ladies.

But there is another and a better, though greatly misguided class. They are those who, though really virtuous, have yet, through early prejudice, so dimmed their rational powers by a shroud of ascetic mysticism, as to be unable clearly to distinguish between the remedy and the disease. Because the surgeon's knife is sharp and glittering, they

VOL. 1.-NO. VI.

imagine that he is an enemy rushing on them sword in hand. One more consideration, if such be wanted, will, we feel confident, remove from the minds of any such who may still be wavering, the last floating doubt of Hogarth's delicacy. Let us make the allowance due to the unconventionalism of his age, as compared with ours, remembering, at the same time, that the object with which he painted the vices of the age, gross and profligate as they were-and these characteristics he has not, in general, wantonly and unnecessarily paraded-was in every case to promote purity, not to pander to profligacy. The pictures of Hogarth, so to speak, not only inculcate, but practise virtue; and the "Marriage à la Mode" will be more efficacious than the Divorce Bill.

But to proceed. In an early portion of this article we have ventured to compare Hogarth with Shakespeare. The poet's best interpreter is the painter. Milton and Dante find their counterparts in Raphael and Michael Angelo; and so, we believe, does Shakespeare, in many respects, in Hogarth. We will attempt to develop this state

ment.

There is one leading idea never absent from the conviction of the true moralist, one article of his belief which he can never reject without at the same time rejecting that which alone can sustain or justify him in combating the vices of his fellow men. We speak not of the cold and heartless creed that finds no virtue in any other faith, no vice within its own exclusive pale. No: a far different creed be ours: one which, avoiding, on the one hand, a narrow-minded asceticism, and, on the other, an extravagant latitudinarianism, shall still recognise in each and every system the element of good around which the parasite vices cluster; the possibility of virtue, nay more, its actual existence; the conviction that no human heart is so hopelessly hardened as to be inaccessible at every point to the kindly sympathy of its fellow men; no scene in which mankind are the actors so utterly devoid of something virtuous, something innocent, as to be unable, by its contrast, eithert o recall the abandoned to a sense of their true destiny, or awaken in the minds of the virtuous feelings of pleasure at the alleviated sense of vice and misery. How true and steadfast believers of this creed have Hogarth and Shakespeare shown themselves to be! Amid the heartlessness of vice, which cannot shed one single tear upon the coffin-lid of her whose body and soul were lost in its service, there sits upon the ground, at the head of the coffin, a little child spinning a top, the only innocent, guileless being in that chamber of horrors. In the "Distressed Poet" see the same characteristic faith working in the painter's mind as he presents

to us the softening, soothing influence of the anxious wife exerting itself visibly upon her husband's worn and haggard brow. In one of the series of plates on "Cruelty," without exception one of the most harrowing and disgusting ever drawn, while the heart sickens and chills with the bare imagination of scenes so entirely devoid of humanity that we are ready to exclaim, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here," the divinity of compassionating innocence dispels the Stygian darkness, and recalls our wandering fancy from the regions of the lost. Compare with these,. Desdemona giving for Othello's pains "a world of sighs," who "loved her that she did pity them." Hear Arthur sobbing as he asks, Have you the heart?-till even Hubert yields to the kindly influence.

Another point in which our comparison is justified is the accurate and intense power of characterization that manifests itself equally in poet and in painter. Their characters, though laid deep in the bosom of nature, are not yet mere abstract classifications. No: theirs is a precision, a reality that speaks of life, and an inexhaustibility of conception that nought save a profusion of genius could ever have embodied or expressed. But in this respect the Bard of Avon soars away into a region of which the painter could never even gain a Pisgah view. The sportive fairies, the airy nymphs, and gentle Ariels, haunt not the "work-day" world of Hogarth's life. Theirs is a region where all is vast, and dim, and shadowy, the outline world of the ideal and the beautiful. And even within the confines of reality Hogarth's genius fails as signally in pourtraying the heroic and the epic, as it has in the world of pure imagination. We might more fully trace the comparison did time permit. But enough has now been written on Hogarth's pictures, which, in the language of Lamb, require to be "studied to be read." Other pictures are looked at-his must be thought over. And if we have created or cherished in the minds of any of our readers a desire to know more of one, whom to know is to appreciate, we shall feel happy in having helped to spread the fame of one whose honour has been, and is still, increasing, like an Alpine avalanche, gathering strength as it advances.

THE PRINCESS ILSE.

FROM HEINE.

The Ilse is a stream near the Hartz valley, in which, once on a time, there abode a beautiful water-fay, who seduced the Emperor Heinrich to the sub-aqueous flirtation alluded to in the following verses.

There silken robes are rustling,

There clanking spurs are borne,
There clash the cymbals gaily,

And peals the bugle horn.

And there, where slept the Kaisar,
Deep sleep shall o'er thee fall;

I held my hand upon his ears
When came the battle call.

THE STUDY OF THE CLASSICS.

(Continued from p. 320.)

WE will pardon (we can afford to pardon) in the ancients much of idle logomachy and showy rhetoric, very much of verbal debate and exploded controversy. We will not dishonour them by a blind implicit attachment to their petty infallibility. Neither will we covet that obliquity of vision which sees "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt," nor pronounce what is foreign to be necessarily faultless. We shall not, in approaching to read those monuments of other men and other things (and what monument is so durable, so indestructible, as language, frail and arbitrary as it may appear and as it is), surrender our senses, nor disown our nationality; we would recruit and re-invigorate them. Else those thinkers of the old world would arise from their graves; if need were, their very tombs would cry out, and forbid us so madly to commit ourselves, conjuring us not to forsake or forego that transcendant privilege and birthright,-liberty of investigation, liberty of speech, liberty of moral conduct,-which they themselves purchased in war with their blood, and preserved in peace by their breath, of which they themselves are the patterns and precedents! How much of our vaunted-how much of our actual-liberality in these latter days is attributable to the fortunate influences of that enlightened criticism, which, not content with borrowing the verdicts of antiquity at second-hand, through the distorting or defective media of versions or paraphrases, refers at once to the "untranslatable" Thucydides, and hunts the Attic bee home to his honeyed hive,-peremptorily refusing all interpretations, however specious, or authoritative, or dogmatically