the Board of Treasury, at which Sir James
is present; every Lord must repair to the print-shop, to obtain for
himself a copy; the vogue was started, and twelve hundred subscribers
entered their names for the Series, the price of each set being one
guinea.

William Hogarth was now well started in his career of fame; and
deservedly so, for in some respects "The Harlot's Progress" is one of
the most characteristic and the most brilliant of his creations. Its
popularity was immense and instantaneous; it was played in pantomime,
and reproduced on ladies' fans. But if he did not surpass the genius of
his first invention he certainly came very close to it, both in the
"Rake's Progress" and in his "Marriage a la Mode."

Each of these Series, as well as that of the "Industrious and Idle
'Prentices" are complete stories, worked out to their _denoument_--
tragedies, one might say, written with a burlesque pencil,
of eighteenth-century life. And if the note struck seem sometimes too
insistent, if the Industrious one be too sleek, too self-complacent, the
prodigal too immersed in sensual folly and indulgence; if the blacks
seem too black, and the whites too white, and those half-tones which
accord the values of life be generally missing; if a more refined age
demands a subtler analysis, a more artistic treatment, can we yet deny
the truth and necessity of the eternal lesson? Have we yet reached, or
shall we ever reach, an age in which ineptitude, insolence, idleness,
fail to work out their inevitable resultant? Or is it less true for us
than for those earlier ages--the message which the writer of that
magnificent thirty-eighth Psalm reiterates, as though he would drive
deep into our souls its lasting verity. "_Put thou thy trust in the Lord
and be doing good; dwell in the land and verily thou shall be fed.
Delight thou in the Lord; and he shall give thee thy heart's desire....
Yet a little while and the ungodly shall be clean gone ... the Lord
shall laugh him to scorn, for he hath seen that his day is coming._"

Just as insistent, just as certain of his concluding verdict as the
Psalmist is the eighteenth-century engraver and humorist. Even his own
day may already have seen "the ungodly" set high above men in social
position, quoted with respect in financial circles, perhaps even a
regular attendant at the local conventicle,--"flourishing," in short, to
quote that inimitable phrase of the same Psalmist, "like a green
bay-tree";