rts, Manufactures, and Commerce, at
the Adelphi, by James Barry, R.A., Professor of Painting to
the Royal Academy, reprinted in the last quarto edition of his
works.]

"----It must be honestly confessed, that in what is called
knowledge of the figure, foreigners have justly observed," &c.

It is a secret well known to the professors of the art and mystery of
criticism, to insist upon what they do not find in a man's works, and
to pass over in silence what they do. That Hogarth did not draw the
naked figure so well as Michael Angelo might be allowed, especially
as "examples of the naked," as Mr. Barry acknowledges, "rarely (he
might almost have said never) occur in his subjects;" and that his
figures under their draperies do not discover all the fine graces of
an Antinoues or an Apollo, may be conceded likewise; perhaps it was
more suitable to his purpose to represent the average forms of
mankind in the mediocrity (as Mr. Burke expresses it) of the age in
which he lived: but that his figures in general, and in his best
subjects, are so glaringly incorrect as is here insinuated, I dare
trust my own eye so far as positively to deny the fact. And there is
one part of the figure in which Hogarth is allowed to have excelled,
which these foreigners seem to have overlooked, or perhaps
calculating from its proportion to the whole (a seventh or an eighth,
I forget which,) deemed it of trifling importance; I mean the human
face; a small part, reckoning by geographical inches, in the map of
man's body, but here it is that the painter of expression must
condense the wonders of his skill, even at the expense of neglecting
the "jonctures and other difficulties of drawing in the limbs," which
it must be a cold eye that, in the interest so strongly demanded by
Hogarth's countenances, has leisure to survey and censure.

"The line of art pursued by my very ingenious predecessor and brother
Academician, Mr. Penny."

The first impression caused in me by reading this passage was an
eager desire to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser of
Hogarth in the "delicacy of his relish," and the "line which he
pursued," where is he, what are his works, what has he to show? In
vain I tried to recollect, till by happily putting the question to a
friend who is more conversant in the works of the illustrious obscure
than myself, I learnt that he was the painter of a _Death of Wolfe_
which missed the prize the year th