as 'to show
vice her own feature, scorn her own image.' He is so far from contenting
himself with still-life that he is always on the verge of caricature,
though without ever falling into it. He does not represent folly or vice
in its incipient, or dormant, or _grub_ state; but full-grown, with
wings, pampered into all sorts of affectation, airy, ostentatious, and
extravagant.... There is a perpetual collision of eccentricities--a tilt
and tournament of absurdities; the prejudices and caprices of mankind
are let loose, and set together by the ears, as in a bear-garden.
Hogarth paints nothing but comedy or tragi-comedy. Wilkie paints neither
one nor the other. Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a
moral or a ludicrous effect. Wilkie never looks at any object but to see
that it is there.... In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your
sides with laughing at the unaccountable jumble of odd things which are
brought together; you look at Wilkie's pictures with a mingled feeling
of curiosity and admiration at the accuracy of the representation." The
distinction thus drawn is, in the main, a just one. Yet, at certain
points, Wilkie comes nearer to Hogarth than any other English artist;
and that elegant amateur, Sir George Howland Beaumont, reasoned rightly
when he judged the painter of _The Village Politicians_ to be, in his
day, the only fit recipient of Hogarth's mahl-stick.

To return to _Marriage A-la-Mode_. Notwithstanding that the pictures
were, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, announced for sale in
1745, it was five years before they actually found a purchaser,
although, in the interval, they seem to have been freely exhibited both
at the "Golden Head" and at Cock's Auction Rooms. In 1750, however, they
were at last disposed of by another of those unfortunate schemes devised
by Hogarth for disposing of his works. The bidding, said the
announcement in the _Daily Advertiser_, was to be by written notes; no
dealers in pictures were to be admitted as bidders; and the highest
bidder at noon on the 6th June was to be the purchaser.

Whether this mode of sale, coupled with the characteristic manner of its
notification, "disobliged the Town" or not, it is impossible to say; but
it is certain that when Mr. Lane, "of Hillingdon, near Uxbridge," who
was to become the lucky proprietor of the pictures, arrived on the date
appointed at the "Golden Head," he found he was the only bidder who had
put in a