labours to force over the dripping limbs his clothes, whilst
gnashing, he pushes the foot through the rending garment. He is
contrasted by the slender elegance of a half-averted youth, who, though
eagerly buckling the armour to his thigh, methodizes haste; another
swings the high-raised hauberk on his shoulder; whilst one, who seems a
leader, mindless of his dress, ready for combat, and with brandished
spear, overturns a third, who crouched to grasp a weapon; one, naked
himself, buckles on the mail of his companion, and he, turned toward
the enemy, seems to stamp impatiently the ground. Experience and rage;
old vigour, young velocity; expanded or contracted, vie in exertions of
energy. Yet in this scene of tumult, one motive animates the
whole--eagerness to engage, with subordination to command. This
preserves the dignity of the action, and from a strangling rabble,
changes the figures to men, whose legitimate contest interests our
wishes." Another example is given--Raffaelle's "Incendio del Borgo"--a
good description follows: "the enraged elements of _wind_ and fire," we
do not see in the original, not even in the drapery of the woman with
her back to us in the foreground. Speaking of this power of "invention,"
he says--after having, as we conceive, mistaken the aim of Raffaelle in
his Madonnas, and Holy families, which was somewhat beyond even the
"charities of father, son, and mother"--"Nor shall I follow it in its
more contaminated descent, to those representations of local manners and
national modifications of society, whose characteristic discrimination
and humorous exuberance, for instance, we admire in Hogarth, but which,
like the fleeting passions of the day, every hour contributes something
to obliterate, which soon become unintelligible by time, or degenerate
into caricature, the chronicle of scandal, the history-book of the
vulgar." It seems, strangely enough, to have been the fashion among the,
in comparison with Hogarth, puny academicians of that day, to underrate
that great painter, that moral painter. We really should pity the
infatuated prejudice of the man, who could see in the deep tragedy, the
moral tragedy, "Marriage a la Mode," any _humorous_ exuberance; or not
understand that the passions set forth, and for a moral end, are not
"the fleeting passions of the day," but as permanent as human
nature--who could see, in such series of pictures, any "caricature," or
that their object is to "chronicle scan