Avon, Avon into Severn, Severn into the
narrow seas, they into the main ocean; and thus the ashes of
Wickliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed all
the world over._"[1]--Church History.

[Footnote 1: The concluding period of this most lively narrative I
will not call a conceit: it is one of the grandest conceptions I ever
met with. One feels the ashes of Wickliffe gliding away out of the
reach of the Sumners, Commissaries, Officials, Proctors, Doctors, and
all the puddering rout of executioners of the impotent rage of the
baffled Council: from Swift into Avon, from Avon into Severn, from
Severn into the narrow seas, from the narrow seas into the main
ocean, where they become the emblem of his doctrine, "dispersed all
the world over." Hamlet's tracing the body of Caesar to the clay that
stops a beer-barrel is a no less curious pursuit of "ruined
mortality;" but it is in an inverse ratio to this: it degrades and
saddens us, for one part of our nature at least; but this expands the
whole of our nature, and gives to the body a sort of ubiquity,--a
diffusion as far as the actions of its partner can have reach or
influence.

I have seen this passage smiled at, and set down as a quaint conceit
of old Fuller. But what is not a conceit to those who read it in a
temper different from that in which the writer composed it? The most
pathetic parts of poetry to cold tempers seem and are nonsense, as
divinity was to the Greeks foolishness. When Richard II., meditating
on his own utter annihilation as to royalty, cries out,

"O that I were a mockery king of snow,
To melt before the sun of Bolingbroke,"

if we had been going on pace for pace with the passion before, this
sudden conversion of a strong-felt metaphor into something to be
actually realized in nature, like that of Jeremiah, "Oh! that my head
were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears," is strictly and
strikingly natural; but come unprepared upon it, and it is a conceit:
and so is a "head" turned into "waters."]

* * * * *

ON THE

GENIUS AND CHARACTER OF HOGARTH;

WITH SOME REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN THE WRITINGS OF THE
LATE MR. BARRY.

* * * * *

One of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy, was in
the contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the _Harlot's_
and _Rake's Progresses_, which, along with some others, hung upon the
walls of a great