at the fascinating page of Matrimony, and to whose luxuriant charms of face and form the eyes of the fat old clerk are stealthily directed. To Hogarth these are the incidents, not the inspiration, of his art. Lavater, that keen

   observer, aimed near to the mark when he wrote: "

    Il ne faut pas attendre beaucoup de noblesse de Hogarth. Le vrai beau n'étoit guère à la portée de ce peintre.

   " It is, indeed, one of the unconscious ironies of art history that the artist, whose work shows least of its influence or attraction, should have devoted the one offspring of his pen to an Analysis of Beauty.

   But it is when we turn to the humour of life, even in its most sordid tragedies, that his real strength appears. "

    Quelle richesse inexprimable

   "—says Lavater again, and no less justly—"

    dans les scènes comiques ou morales de la vie

   ." None like Hogarth has characterised "the lowest types of modern humanity, has better depicted the drunken habits of the dregs of the people, the follies of life, and the horrors of vice." And it is just here, as I have hinted, that Hogarth connects himself with the later caricaturists.

   It were quite possible to treat a purely moral story, such as that of "The Industrious and the Idle Apprentice," in a purely moral sentiment; but this is just what our artist cannot bring himself to do. He must have that touch of nature, and of humour, which makes the whole world kin. He

   must introduce the quarrelling cat and dog into the office scene between West and Goodchild, or the feline visitant whose apparition through the chimney disturbs Thomas Idle's unhallowed slumbers; he must accentuate the gormandising guests in the Sheriff's banquet, and the humours of the crowd even in a Tyburn execution. And in other subjects—where the moral lesson is either absent or less intrusive—the man's fancy runs absolutely riot in humorous observation. "The Distressed Poet," with the baby squalling in his bed, the poor wife stitching at his solitary pair of breeches, and a strapping milkmaid clamouring for payment of her account; "The Enraged Musician," with every conceivable pandemonium of noise 

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