ntempt or wonder, looks
through an open window at an ill-designed and partly-erected building,
in front of which several idle servants are lounging or sitting. Like
Pope's "Visto," the Earl has "a taste," and his taste, interrupted for
the moment by lack of funds, is the ruinous one of bricks and mortar.

The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirize the fashion of the time.
The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl's
ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly. A cannon explodes
below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right hand, notwithstanding
his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the
thunderbolt of Jupiter. _Judith and Holofernes_, _St. Sebastian_, _The
Murder of Abel_, _David and Goliath_, _The Martyrdom of St. Laurence_,
are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note,
belong to those "dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor
ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh.
Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is _Pharaoh
in the Red Sea_. From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the
proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the
_Strolling Actresses_, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy
freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the part of Diana.

In the picture of the _Contract_, the young people and "Counsellor
Silvertongue," as he has been christened by the artist, are placed in
close proximity. These are the real actors in the drama. Building
_immemor sepulcri_, the old earl had but few years to live. Henceforth
he is seen no more; and the alderman reappears only at the end of the
story....

We have only dealt briefly with these concluding pictures, the
decorations and accessories of which are to the full as minute and
effective as those of the one that precede them. The furniture of the
bagnio, with its portrait of Moll Flanders humorously continued by the
sturdy legs of a Jewish soldier in the tapestry _Judgment of Solomon_
behind, the half-burned candle flaring in the draught of the open door
and window, the reflection of the lantern on the ceiling and the shadow
of the tongs on the floor, the horror-stricken look on the mask of the
lady and the satanic grin on that of her paramour, all deserve notice.
So do the gross Dutch pictures in the alderman's house, the sordid
pewter plates and the sumptuous silver goblet, the stained table-cloth