-show the deepest insight into human nature, and
into the effects of those refinements in depravity, by which it has been
good-naturedly asserted that 'vice loses half its evil in losing all its
grossness.'" In the death of the Countess, again, he speaks thus of two
of the subordinate characters:--"We would particularly refer to the
captious, petulant self-sufficiency of the apothecary, whose face and
figure are constructed on exact physiognomical principles, and to the
fine example of passive obedience, and non-resistance in the servant,
whom he is taking to task, and whose coat of green and yellow livery is
as long and melancholy as his face. The disconsolate look, the haggard
eyes, the open mouth, the comb sticking in the hair, the broken gapped
teeth, which, as it were, hitch in an answer--everything about him
denotes the utmost perplexity and dismay." Some other of Hazlitt's
comments are more fanciful, as, for example, when he compares Lady
Squanderfield's curl papers (in the "Toilet Scene") to a "wreath of
half-blown flowers," and those of the macaroni-amateur to "a
_chevaux-de-frise_ of horns, which adorn and fortify the lack-lustre
expression and mild resignation of the face beneath." With his
condemnation of the attitude of the husband, in the scene at the "Turk's
Head Bagnio," as "one in which it would be impossible for him to stand,
or even fall," it is difficult to coincide; and it is an illustration of
the contradictions of criticism that this very figure should have been
selected for especial praise, with particular reference to the charges
made against the painter of defective drawing, by another critic who was
not only as keenly sympathetic as Hazlitt, but was probably a better
anatomist--the author of _Rab and his Friends_.

To Hazlitt's general estimate of Hogarth we shall not now refer. But his
comparison of Hogarth and Wilkie may fairly be summarized in this place,
because it contains so much excellent discrimination of the former.
Wilkie, Hazlitt contends, is a simple realist; Hogarth is a comic
painter. While one is a "serious, prosaic, literal narrator of facts,"
the other is a moral satirist, "exposing vice and folly in their most
ludicrous points of view, and, with a profound insight into the weak
sides of character and manners in all their tendencies, combinations,
and contrasts.... He is carried away by a passion for the _ridiculous_.
His object is not so much 'to hold the mirror up to nature'