espects a unique painter.
In the National Gallery there is a picture of the heads of his six
servants in a double row. They might all be characters from Dickens,
so vividly and sympathetically humorous is each.

In his engravings Hogarth satirised the lives of all classes of the
society of his day. When we look at them we live again in
eighteenth-century London, and walk in streets known to fame though
now destroyed, thronged with men and women, true to life.

As an artist, Hogarth occupies a position between the
seventeenth-century Dutch painters of low life and the English
painters that succeeded him, who expressed the ideals of a refined
society. His portraits have something of the strength of Rembrandt's.
His street and tavern scenes rival Jan Steen's; but behind the mere
representation of brutality, vice, crime, and misery we perceive not
merely a skilled craftsman but a moral being, whom contact with misery
deeply stirs and the sight of wickedness moves to indignation.

After 1720 a succession of distinguished painters were born in England.
Many of them first saw the light in obscure villages in the depths
of the country. Reynolds came from Devonshire, Gainsborough from
Suffolk, Romney from the Lake country.

The eighteenth century was a time when politicians and men of letters
had the habit of gathering in the coffee-houses of London--forerunners
of the clubs of to-day. Conversation was valued as one of life's best
enjoyments, and the varied society of actors, authors, and politicians,
in which it flourished best, could only be obtained in the town. To
the most distinguished circle of that kind in London, our painter
Reynolds belonged.

In the eighteenth century, society had also begun to divide its time
in modern fashion between town and country. Many of the large country
houses of to-day, and nearly all the landscape-gardened parks, belong
to that date. Nevertheless it was a time of great artificiality of
life. The ladies had no short country skirts, and none of the freedom
to which we are accustomed. In London they wore long powdered curls
and rouged, and in the country too they did not escape from the
artificiality of fashion. Indeed, their great desire seems to have
been to get away from everything natural and spontaneous. The
artificial poetry of that time deals with the patch-boxes and
powder-puffs of the fashionable dames of the town, and with nymphs
and Dresden china shepherdesses in the country.