e latter may
not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of
subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from
that very common life a great artist may not extract as deep an
interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call
history.

I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of
Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and
stifle the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names
and classifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the
greatest ornaments of England.

I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Reynolds, whether in the
countenances of his _Staring_ and _Grinning Despair_, which he has
given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be
anything comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the
face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the _Rake's
Progress_,[1] where a letter from the manager is brought to him to
say that his play "will not do?" Here all is easy, natural,
undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated!--the
long history of a misspent life is compressed into the countenance as
plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no
attempt at Gorgonian looks, which are to freeze the beholder--no
grinning at the antique bedposts--no face-making, or consciousness of
the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept
to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which
great anguish sometimes brings with it,--a final leave taken of
hope,--the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,--a beginning
alienation of mind looking like tranquillity. Here is matter for the
mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together,--matter to
feed and fertilize the mind. It is too real to admit one thought
about the power of the artist who did it. When we compare the
expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find
the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere
contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid, in the one
case, in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and, in the other, in the
State Prison of Pisa, or the bedroom of a cardinal,--or that the
subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is
matter of history,--so weigh down the real points, of the comparison,
as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or
subject (thou