gh confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the
soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius
(who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like
disgrace?[2]

[Footnote 1: The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious
expression. That which comes next to it, I think, is the jaded
morning countenance of the debauchee in the second plate of the
_Marriage Alamode_, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as
audibly as anything in Ecclesiastes.]

[Footnote 2: Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his Lectures, speaks
of the _presumption_ of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in
painting, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.
Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what
he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have
expression of _some sort or other_ in them,--the _Child Moses before
Pharaoh's Daughter_, for instance: which is more than can be said of
Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Repose in Egypt_, painted for Macklin's Bible,
where for a Madonna he has substituted a sleepy, insensible,
unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the
Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor
feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all. But indeed the race
of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch,
at the Reformation. Our artists are too good Protestants to give life
to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential
awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers
of L. da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances
inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in
the person of their Heaven-born Infant.]

_The Boys under Demoniacal Possession_ of Raphael and Domenichino, by
what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to
the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class
the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene? I am
sure he is far more impressive than either. It is a face which no one
that has seen can easily forget. There is the stretch of human
suffering to the utmost endurance, severe bodily pain brought on by
strong mental agony, the frightful, obstinate laugh of madness,--yet
all so unforced and natural, that those who never were witness to
madness in real life, think they see nothing but what is familiar to
them in this face. Here