,
the egg in rice, and the pig's head which the half-starved and ravenous
dog is stealing. There is no defect of invention, no superfluity of
detail, no purposeless stroke in this "owre true tale." From first to
last it progresses steadily to its catastrophe by a forward march of
skilfully linked and fully developed incidents. It is like a novel of
Fielding on canvas; and it seems inconceivable that, with this
magnificent work _en evidence_, the critics of that age should have been
contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that "as a painter Hogarth
had but slender merit," and to cackle the foot-rule criticisms of the
Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance of composition. But so it was.
Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in
1814, was it thoroughly understood how excellent and individual both as
a designer and a colourist was this native artist, whom
"Picture-dealers, Picture-cleaners, Picture-frame-makers, and other
Connoisseurs"--to use his own graphically ironical words--had been
allowed to rank below the third-rate copyists of third-rate foreigners.

Beyond the remark that the "jaded morning countenance" of the Viscount
in Scene II. "lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as anything
in Ecclesiastics," Lamb's incomparable essay in _The Reflector_ makes no
material reference to _Marriage A-la-Mode_. His comments, besides, are
confined to the engravings. But Hazlitt, who saw the pictures in the
above-mentioned exhibition in 1814, devotes much of his criticism to the
tragedy of the Squanderfields, chiefly, it would seem, because Lamb had
left the subject untouched. Hazlitt's own studies as an artist, his keen
insight and his quick enthusiasm, made him a memorable critic of
Hogarth, whose general characteristics he defines with admirable
exactitude. Much quotation has made his description of the young Lord
and Counsellor Silvertongue sufficiently familiar. But he is equally
good in his vignette of the younger woman in the episode at the Quack
Doctor's, a creation which he rightly regards as one of Hogarth's most
successful efforts. "Nothing," he says, "can be more striking than the
contrast between the extreme softness of her person and the hardened
indifference of her character. The vacant stillness, the docility to
vice, the premature suppression of youthful sensibility, the doll-like
mechanism of the whole figure, which seems to have no other feeling but
a sickly sense of pain-