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little out of order to place Hogarth among the delineators of female loveliness. The genius that entered so feelingly into the calamities and crimes of familiar life,' wrote Horace Walpole, 'deserted him in a walk that called for dignity and grace. Danaë herself is a mere nymph of Drury. He seems to have conceived no higher idea of beauty.'

Hogarth was essentially the painter of real life. He had little to do with the ideal. When he attempted 'high art,' he failed. But it is a mistake which even a finegentleman critic like Walpole ought not to have made, to say that Hogarth 'had conceived no higher idea of beauty' than the degrading one he mentions. Hogarth could paint a beautiful woman better than most of his rivals. But then it was the beauty of actual life, not the ideal beauty of poetry. Hogarth was not a Raffaelle or an Angelico. He was a plain Englishman, portraying the social life of his countrymen in the middle of the eighteenth century. This is his great excellence. Beyond every other painter, he was the painter of the manners of his own time.

Whilst his contemporaries were covering walls and ceilings with foolish allegories, in which the unheroic personages of the day were mixed up with heathen gods and goddesses, or attempting to convey, by conventional attitudes, costumes that belong to no age or country, and impossible copy-book expressions, the scenes of Scriptural, classical, or national history, Hogarth addressed himself to the task of depicting what he saw going on around him, and, by stripping off the conventional veil, showing how mean and despicable, as well as hateful, were the prevalent vices, and how contemptible and debasing the fashionable manners.

This was no light thing to do. The reign of the second George was a period of more open profligacy

than any other, except that of the second Charles. The sovereign, dullard as he was, was as public in his immorality as his livelier predecessor. The courtiers, following his example, revelled in the lowest pleasures. Statesmen and senators were notoriously venal. Bishops and clergy were non-resident and non-religious. That there was little to choose between the higher and the lower classes, 'A Midnight Conversation' and 'Gin Lane' sufficiently attest. To paint the manners of such a time was a serious undertaking, and, mere humorist as he is sometimes supposed to be, Hogarth set about it in a serious spirit. A censor as unsparing, a satirist as bitter, as scathing, and as outspoken, as Juvenal, it is not to be denied that he was at times nearly as coarse. But his coarseness, much as in many cases it is to be regretted, is seldom without a purpose that accounts for, if it cannot justify, it. He lived in a coarse as well as a corrupt age, and his pictures were addressed to those who lived and played a part in it. To reach them there must be the utmost plainness of utterance. He dealt with subjects that must be represented freely to be represented truly. We may wish that he had not chosen them, or that he had worked out his purpose with less offensive materials. But from his point of view that could not be. We must, therefore, accept his works as they are, though for family purposes we may be driven to employ a Bowdlerized edition.

It would be easy to select examples of beautiful heads from many of his pictures. We have taken one, not as the most beautiful, but as one of the most expressive, from the Dressing Room scene, in the famous series, 'The Marriage à la Mode,' in the National Gallery. When Horace Walpole pronounced Hogarth to be 'the greatest master in the burlesque way,' it was generally regarded as a high compliment. But