preyed upon sore places
only, and took a pleasure in exposing the unsound and rotten parts of
human nature:--whereas, with the exception of some of the plates of
the _Harlot's Progress_, which are harder in their character than any
of the rest of his productions (the _Stages of Cruelty_ I omit as
mere worthless caricatures, foreign to his general habits, the
offspring of his fancy in some wayward humor), there is scarce one of
his pieces where vice is most strongly satirized, in which some
figure is not introduced upon which the moral eye may rest satisfied;
a face that indicates goodness, or perhaps mere good-humoredness and
carelessness of mind (negation of evil) only, yet enough to give a
relaxation to the frowning brow of satire, and keep the general air
from tainting. Take the mild, supplicating posture of patient Poverty
in the poor woman that is persuading the pawnbroker to accept her
clothes in pledge, in the plate of _Gin Lane_, for an instance. A
little does it, a little of the _good_ nature overpowers a world of
_bad_. One cordial honest laugh of a Tom Jones absolutely clears the
atmosphere that was reeking with the black putrefying breathings of a
hypocrite Blifil. One homely expostulating shrug from Strap warms the
whole air which the suggestions of a gentlemanly ingratitude from his
friend Random had begun to freeze. One "Lord bless us!" of Parson
Adams upon the wickedness of the times, exorcises and purges off the
mass of iniquity which the world-knowledge of even a Fielding could
cull out and rake together. But of the severer class of Hogarth's
performances, enough, I trust, has been said to show that they do not
merely shock and repulse; that there is in them the "scorn of vice"
and the "pity" too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive the
sense of moral beauty; the "lacrymae rerum," and the sorrowing by
which the heart is made better. If they be bad things, then is satire
and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and
sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations: let us

"----wink, and shut our apprehensions up
From common sense of what men were and are:"

let us _make believe_ with the children, that everybody is good and
happy; and, with Dr. Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.

But that larger half of Hogarth's works, which were painted more for
entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of
his mind that there is always som