tanned and brown, the other, of which we see the
palm, is white. "To the bride the painter has given a face full of
charm, of seemliness, of reserve. She is dressed to perfection. That
apron of white stuff could not be better; there is a trifle of luxury in
her ornament; but then it is a wedding-day. You should note how true are
the folds and creases in her dress, and in those of the rest. The
charming girl is not quite straight; but there is a light and gentle
inflexion in all her figure and her limbs that fills her with grace and
truth. Indeed she is pretty and very pretty. If she had leaned more
towards her lover, it would have been unbecoming; more to her mother and
her father, and she would have been false. She has her arm half passed
under that of her future husband, and the tips of her fingers rest
softly on his hand; that is the only mark of tenderness that she gives
him, and perhaps without knowing it herself: it is a delicate idea in
the painter."[34]

[34] x. 151-156. Dr. Waagen pronounces this picture to be as truly
an expression of _das Nationalfranzoesiche_ as Wilkie's paintings are
of _das Englische_. See his _Kunstwerke und Kuenstler in Paris_, p.
675.

"Courage, my good Greuze," he cries, "_fais de la morale en peinture_.
What, has not the pencil been long enough and too long consecrated to
debauchery and vice? Ought we not to be delighted at seeing it at last
unite with dramatic poetry in instructing us, correcting us, inviting us
to virtue?"[35] It has been sometimes said that Diderot would have
exulted in the paintings of Hogarth, and we may admit that he would have
sympathised with the spirit of such moralities as the Idle and the
Industrious Apprentice, the Rake's Progress, and Mariage a la Mode. The
intensity and power of that terrible genius would have had their
attraction, but the minute ferocities of Hogarth's ruthless irony would
certainly have revolted him. Such a scene as Lord Squanderfield's visit
to the quack doctor, or as the Rake's debauch, would have filled him
with inextinguishable horror. He could never have forgiven an artist
who, in the ghastly pathos of a little child straining from the arms of
its nurse towards the mother, as she lies in the very article of death,
could still find in his heart to paint on it the dark patches of foul
disease. He would have fled with shrieks from those appalling scenes of
murder, torture, madness, bestial drunkenness, rapacity, fury