ioned, may serve as instances instead of a thousand.
They have intense thinking faces, though the purpose to which they
are subservient by no means required it; but indeed it seems as if it
was painful to Hogarth to contemplate mere vacancy or insignificance.

[Footnote 1: If there are any of that description, they are in his
_Strolling Players_, a print which has been cried up by Lord Orford
as the richest of his productions, and it may be, for what I know, in
the mere lumber, the properties, and dead furniture of the scene, but
in living character and expression it is (for Hogarth) lamentably
poor and wanting; it is perhaps the only one of his performances at
which we have a right to feel disgusted.]

This reflection of the artist's own intellect from the faces of his
characters, is one reason why the works of Hogarth, so much more than
those of any other artist, are objects of meditation. Our
intellectual natures love the mirror which gives them back their own
likenesses. The mental eye will not bend long with delight upon
vacancy.

Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common
painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often
confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the most unpromising
subjects seems never wholly to have deserted him. "Hogarth himself,"
says Mr. Coleridge,[1] from whom I have borrowed this observation,
speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more
ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, than this
effect occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those
beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, _in whom the satirist
never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a
poet_, so often and so gladly introduces as the central figure in a
crowd of humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of
true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act as a contrast; but
diffuses through all and over each of the group a spirit of
reconciliation and human kindness; and even when the attention is no
longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still
blends its tenderness with our laughter: and _thus prevents the
instructive merriment at the whims of nature, or the foibles or
humors of our fellow-men, from degenerating into the heart-poison of
contempt or hatred_." To the beautiful females in Hogarth, which Mr.
C. has pointed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of
children (which Ho