at the celebrated picture of West
on the same subject obtained it; that he also made a picture of the
_Marquis of Granby relieving a Sick Soldier_; moreover, that he was
the inventor of two pictures of _Suspended and Restored Animation_,
which I now remember to have seen in the Exhibition some years since,
and the prints from which are still extant in good men's houses.
This, then, I suppose, is the line of subjects in which Mr. Penny was
so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of that opinion. The
relieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young man to
his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Humane Society,
are doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to teach the first
rudiments of humanity; they amount to about as much instruction as
the stories of good boys that give away their custards to poor
beggar-boys in children's books. But, good God! is this _milk for
babes_ to be set up in opposition to Hogarth's moral scenes, his
_strong meat for men_? As well might we prefer the fulsome verses
upon their own goodness to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund
annually sit still with such shameless patience to listen, to the
satires of Juvenal and Persius; because the former are full of tender
images of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity stretching out her
hand to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme of the latter is men's
crimes and follies with their black consequences--forgetful meanwhile
of those strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart-touches, which
these poets (in _them_ chiefly showing themselves poets) are
perpetually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their
subject--consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty
mankind have made us even to despair for our species, that there is
such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in the world, that her
unquenchable spark is not utterly out--refreshing admonitions, to
which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity of the
general satire.

And is there nothing analogous to this in Hogarth? nothing which
"attempts and reaches the heart?"--no aim beyond that of "shaking the
sides?"--If the kneeling ministering female in the last scene of the
_Rake's Progress_, the Bedlam scene, of which I have spoken before,
and have dared almost to parallel it with the most absolute idea of
Virtue which Shakspeare has left us, be not enough to disprove the
assertion; if the sad endings of the Harlot and the Ra