o
had formed their ideas of Sigismonda upon the inspired page of Dryden,
was no easy task.

The bard has consecrated the character, and his heroine glitters with a
brightness that cannot be transferred to the canvass. Mr. Walpole's
description, though equally radiant, is too various, for the utmost
powers of the pencil.

Hogarth's Sigismonda, as this gentleman poetically expresses it, "has
none of the sober grief, no dignity of suppressed anguish, no
involuntary tear, no settled meditation on the fate she meant to meet,
no amorous warmth turned holy by despair; in short, all is wanting that
should have been there, all is there that such a story would have
banished from a mind capable of conceiving such complicated woe; woe so
sternly felt, and yet so tenderly." This glowing picture presents to the
mind a being whose contending passions may be felt, but were not
delineated even by Corregio. Had his tints been aided by the grace and
greatness of Raphael, they must have failed.

The author of the Mysterious Mother sought for sublimity, where the
artist strictly copied nature, which was invariably his archetype, but
which the painter, who soars into fancy's fairy regions, must in a
degree desert. Considered with this reference, though the picture has
faults, Mr. Walpole's satire is surely too severe. It is built upon a
comparison with works painted in a language of which Hogarth knew not
the idiom,--trying him before a tribunal, whose authority he did not
acknowledge, and from the picture having been in many respects altered
after the critic saw it, some of the remarks become unfair. To the
frequency of these alterations we may attribute many of the errors: the
man who has not confidence in his own knowledge of the leading
principles on which his work ought to be built, will not render it
perfect by following the advice of his friends. Though Messrs. Wilkes
and Churchill dragged his heroine to the altar of politics, and mangled
her with a barbarity that can hardly be paralleled, except in the
history of her husband,--the artist retained his partiality; which seems
to have increased in exact proportion to their abuse. The picture being
thus contemplated through the medium of party prejudice, we cannot
wonder that all its imperfections were exaggerated. The painted harlot
of Babylon had not more opprobrious epithets from the first race of
reformers than the painted Sigismonda of Hogarth from the last race of
patriots.