ke, the
passionate heart-bleeding entreaties for forgiveness which the
adulterous wife is pouring forth to her assassinated and dying lord
in the last scene but one of the _Marriage Alamode_,--if these be not
things to touch the heart, and dispose the mind to a meditative
tenderness: is there nothing sweetly conciliatory in the mild patient
face and gesture with which the wife seems to allay and ventilate the
feverish irritated feelings of her poor poverty-distracted mate (the
true copy of the _genus irritabile_), in the print of the _Distrest
Poet_? or if an image of maternal love be required, where shall we
find a sublimer view of it than in that aged woman in _Industry and
Idleness_ (plate V.) who is clinging with the fondness of hope not
quite extinguished to her brutal vice-hardened child, whom she is
accompanying to the ship which is to bear him away from his native
soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy: in whose shocking face
every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute
beast's to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who
watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered, and
feels it must belong to her while a pulse by the vindictive laws of
his country shall be suffered to continue to beat in it. Compared
with such things, what is Mr. Penny's "knowledge of the figure and
academical skill which Hogarth wanted?"

With respect to what follows concerning another gentleman, with the
congratulations to him on his escape out of the regions of "humor and
caricatura," in which it appears he was in danger of travelling side
by side with Hogarth, I can only congratulate my country, that Mrs.
Hogarth knew _her_ province better than, by disturbing her husband at
his palette, to divert him from that universality of subject, which
has stamped him perhaps, next to Shakspeare, the most inventive
genius which this island has produced, into the "amiable pursuit of
beautiful nature," _i.e._, copying ad infinitum the individual charms
and graces of Mrs. H. "Hogarth's method of exposing meanness,
deformity, and vice, paddling in whatever is ridiculous, faulty, and
vicious."

A person unacquainted with the works thus stigmatized would be apt to
imagine that in Hogarth there was nothing else to be found but
subjects of the coarsest and most repulsive nature. That his
imagination was naturally unsweet, and that he delighted in raking
into every species of moral filth. That he