seen of individual identity, and to
think what a chance they have of living, as the Spanish friar said to
Wilkie, when the living have passed away. But it only makes more
exasperating to me the obstinate one-sidedness of the thing. When a man
shows so forcibly the side of the medal on which the people in their
faults and crimes are stamped, he is the more bound to help us to a
glance at that other side on which the faults and vices of the
governments placed over the people are not less gravely impressed."

This led to some remark on Hogarth's method in such matters, and I am
glad to be able to preserve this fine criticism of that great
Englishman, by a writer who closely resembled him in genius; as another
generation will be probably more apt than our own to discover. "Hogarth
avoided the Drunkard's Progress, I conceive, precisely because the
causes of drunkenness among the poor were so numerous and widely spread,
and lurked so sorrowfully deep and far down in all human misery,
neglect, and despair, that even _his_ pencil could not bring them fairly
and justly into the light. It was never his plan to be content with only
showing the effect. In the death of the miser-father, his shoe new-soled
with the binding of his bible, before the young Rake begins his career;
in the worldly father, listless daughter, impoverished young lord, and
crafty lawyer, of the first plate of Marriage-a-la mode; in the
detestable advances through the stages of Cruelty; and in the progress
downward of Thomas Idle; you see the effects indeed, but also the
causes. He was never disposed to spare the kind of drunkenness that was
of more 'respectable' engenderment, as one sees in his midnight modern
conversation, the election plates, and crowds of stupid aldermen and
other guzzlers. But after one immortal journey down Gin-lane, he turned
away in pity and sorrow--perhaps in hope of better things, one day, from
better laws and schools and poor men's homes--and went back no more. The
scene of Gin-lane, you know, is that just cleared away for the
extension of Oxford-street, which we were looking at the other day; and
I think it a remarkable trait of Hogarth's picture, that while it
exhibits drunkenness in the most appalling forms, it also forces on
attention a most neglected wretched neighbourhood, and an unwholesome,
indecent, abject condition of life that might be put as frontispiece to
our sanitary report of a hundred years later date. I have always m