, in his own day, the terrible Dean of St.
Patrick's; from his house in Leicester Fields he looks out upon the
London of his day, and probes with his remorseless brush or graver to
the hidden roots of its follies, its vices, and crimes. "He may be said
to have created," says one of his early biographers,[2] "a new species
of painting, which may be termed the _moral comic_;" meaning, thereby,
that the instinctive humour of the man's art is generally (not, as we
shall see, always) directed to some moral purpose, some lesson of
conduct to be thence derived. That is just where Hogarth connects
himself, inevitably and intimately, with the Puritan England which had
preceded him. Not for nothing had that century, into whose last years he
was born, seen the great uprising of Puritan England,--the struggle for
civil and political liberty, and its achievement,--the Ironsides of
Cromwell with Bible and uplifted sword. That intensity of moral and
spiritual conviction, that earnestness about life and its issues was
yet in the nation's blood, and must find some outlet in the returning
world of art, which its own austerity had banished; but, in another
sense, mark how truly Hogarth connects himself with the later
caricaturists of the coming age.

=_By William Hogarth_ MORNING=

Beauty does not enter into his art,--most of all in that highest sense
of plastic beauty of form, which the great Italians had so intensely
felt, which the great English school, uprising in his own day, was in
some measure to recover. At most a comely buxom wench steals sometimes
slyly into his canvas or copper-plate--the two servant-maids in his
print of "Morning" at Covent Garden, whom the roysterers turning out
from Tom King's coffee-house are kissing in the Piazza; the demure and
pretty Miss West, looking over a joint hymn book with the amorous--but
industrious--apprentice; or that coy minx--most delicious of them
all--who has just dozed off amid "The Sleeping Congregation," with her
prayer-book opened 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'etoit guere a la portee de ce peintre._" It
is, indeed, one of the unconscious ironies of art history that