the perverted view he takes of the conduct which the colonists ought to observe with regard to his institution, since he considers them bound to assist in its support. Even in this seclusion from the world, Vander Kemp has written two large works, which have been printed in Europe. Towards the end of the year 1805, he was summoned to the Cape Town, on account of some disturbances which had arisen in his institution, and it is probable, that the consequence would not have been very pleasant to him, if the arrival of the English had not put an end to its process. It was, however, the occasion of the institution being removed from the neighbourhood of the Caffre borders, into the interior of the colony. be to mistake no less grossly their aim and purpose. A set of severer Satires (for they are not so much Comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine Satires) less mingled with any thing of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in Timon of Athens. I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered,-"Shakspeare:" being asked which he esteemed next best, replied," Hogarth." His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at, his prints we read. In pursuance of this parallel, I have sometimes entertained myself with comparing the Timon of Athens On the Genius and Character of Ho- of Shakspeare (which I have just GARTH. ONE of the earliest and noblest enjoyments I had when a boy was in the contemplation of those capital prints by Hogarth, the Harlot's and Rake's Progresses, which, along with some others, hung upon the walls of a great hall in an old-fashioned house shire, and seemed the solitary tenants (with myself) of that antiquated and life-deserted apartment. In - Recollection of the manner in which those prints used to affect me, has often made me wonder, when I have heard Hogarth described as a mere comic painter, as one whose chief ambition was to raise a laugh. To deny that there are throughout the prints which I have mentioned circumstances introduced of a laughable tendency, would be to run counter to the common notions of mankind; but to suppose that in their ruling character they appeal chiefly to the risible faculty, and not first and foremost to the very heart of man, its best and most serious feelings, would mentioned) and Hogarth's Rake's Progress together. The story, the moral, in both is nearly the same. The wild course of riot and extravagance, ending in the one with driving the Prodigal from the society of men into the solitude of the deserts, and in the other with conducting the Rake through his several stages of dissipation into the still more complete desolations of the mad-house, in the play and in the picture are described with almost equal force and nature. The levee of the Rake, which forms the subject of the second plate in the series, is almost a transcript of Timon's Levee in the opening scene of that play. We find a dedicating poet, and other similar characters, in both. The concluding scene in the Rake's Progress is perhaps superior to the last scenes of Timon. If we seek for something of kindred excellence in poetry, it must be in the scenes of Lear's beginning madness, where the King and the Fool and the Tom-o'Bedlam conspire to produce such a medley of mirth checked by misery, and and misery rebuked by mirth; where the society of those "strange bed-fellows" which misfortunes have brought Lear acquainted with, so finely, sets forth the destitute state of the monarch, while the lunatic bans of the ene, and the disjointed sayings and wild but pregnant allusions of the other, so wonderfully sympathize with that confusion, which they seem to assist in the production of, in the senses of that "child-changed father." In the scene in Bedlam, which terminates the Rake's Progress, we find the same assortment of the ludicrous with the terrible. Here is desperate madness, the overturning of originally strong thinking faculties, at which we shudder, as we contemplate the duration and pressure of affliction which it must have asked to destroy such a building;-and here is the gradual hurtless lapse into idiocy, of faculties, which at their best of times never having been strong, we look upon the consummation of their decay with no more of pity than is consistent with a smile. The mad taylor, the poor driveller that has gone out of his wits (and truly he appears to have had no great journey to go to get past their confines) for the love of Charming Betty Careless, these balf-laughable scarce-pitiable objects, take off from the horror which the principal figure would of itself raise, at the same time that they assist the feeling of the scene by contributing to the general notion of its subject: Madness, thou chaos of the brain, • Lines inscribed under the plate. Is it carrying the spirit of comparison to excess to remark, that in the poor kneeling weeping female, who accompanies her seducer in his sad decay, there is something analogous to Kent, or Caius, as he delights rather to be called, in Lear,-the noblest pattern of virtue which even Shakspeare has conceived,-who follows his royal master in banishment, that had pronounced his banishment, and forgetful at once of his wrongs and dignities, taking on himself the disguise of a menial, retains his fidelity to the figure, his loyalty to the carcase, the shadow, the shell and empty husk of Lear? In the perusal of a book, or of a picture, much of the impression which we receive depends upon the habit of mind which we bring with us to such perusal. The same circumstance may make one person laugh, which shall render another very serious; or in the same person the first impression may be corrected by after-thought. The misemployed incongruous characters at the Harlot's Funeral, on a superficial inspection, provoke to laughter; but when we have sacrificed the first emotion to levity, a very different frame of mind succeeds, or the painter has lost half his purpose. I never look at that wonderful assemblage of depraved beings, who, without a grain of reverence or pity in their perverted minds, are performing the sacred exteriors of duty to the relicks of their departed partner in fol, ly, but I am as much moved to sympathy from the very want of it in them, as I should be by the finest representation of a virtuous death-bed surrounded by real mourners, pious children, weeping friends,-perhaps more by the very contrast. What reflexions does it not awake, of the dreadful heartless state in which the creature (a female too) must have lived, who in death wants the accompaniment of one genuine tear. That wretch who is removing the lid of the a coffin to gaze upon the corpse, with face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhoodthe hypocrite Parson and his demure partner all the fiendish group-to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcase had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet. It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this picture, incongruous objects being of the very essence of laughter,-but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from that thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart year with filial fundmess towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to fleece and plunder,-we smile at the exquisite irony of the passage, but if we are not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of them in book or picture. It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture, would alone unvulgarize every subject which he might choose. Let us take the lowest of his subjects, the print called Gin Lane. Here is plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view; and accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted and repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to bear it. The same persons would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon Poussin's celebrated picture of the Plague at Athens *. Disease, and Death, and bewildering Terror, in Athenian garments, are endurable, and come, as the delicate critics express it, within "the limits of pleasurable sensation." But the scenes of their own St Giles's, delineated by their own countryman, are too shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds from the fascinating colours of the picture, and forget the coarse execution (in some respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to the poorer sort of people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it-that power which draws all things to one, which makes things, animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of "strange images of death." It is perfectly amazing and astounding to look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman and the half-dead man, which are as terrible as any thing which Michael Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in the print contributes to bewilder and stupefy, the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunkseem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of phrenzy which goes forth over the whole composition. To shew the poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little circumstance may serve. At the late Mr Hope's, in Cavendishsquare, serve. Not content with the dying and dead figures, which he has strewed in profusion over the proper scene of the action, he shews you what (of a kindred nature) is passing beyond it. Close by the shell, in which, by direction of the parish beadle, a man is depositing his wife, is an old wall, which, partaking of the universal decay around it, is tumbling to pieces. Through a gap in this wall are seen three figures, which appear to make a part in some funeral procession which is passing by on the other side of the wall out of the sphere of the composition. This extending of the interest beyond the bounds of the subject could only have been conceived by a great genius. Shakspeare, in his description of the Painting of the Trojan War, in his Tarquin and Lucrece, has introduced a similar device, where the painter made a part stand for the whole : For much imaginary work was there, This he well calls Imaginary work, where the spectator must meet the artist in his conceptions half way; and it is peculiar to the confidence of high genius alone to trust so much to spectators or readers. Lesser artists shew every thing distinct and full, as they require an object to be made out to themselves before they can comprehend it. When I think of the power displayed in this (I will not hesitate to say) sublime print, it seems to me the extreme narrowness of system alone, and of that rage for classification, by which, in matters of taste at least, we are perpetually perplexing instead of arranging our ideas, that would make us concede to the work of Poussin above mentioned, and deny to Jan. 1814. this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition. We are for ever deceiving ourselves with names and theories. We call one man a great historical painter, because he has saken for his subjects kings or great men, or transactions over which time has thrown a grandeur. We term another the painter of common life, and set him down in our minds for an artist of an inferior class, without reflecting whether the quantity of thought shewn by the latter may not much more than level the distinction which their mere choice of subjects may seem to place between them; or whether, in fact, from that very common life, a great artist may not extract as deep an interest as another man from that which we are pleased to call History. I entertain the highest respect for the talents and virtues of Reynolds, but I do not like that his reputation should overshadow and stifle the merits of such a man as Hogarth, nor that to mere names and classifications we should be content to sacrifice one of the greatest ornaments of England. I would ask the most enthusiastic admirer of Ryenolds, whether in the ning Despair, which he has given us countenances of his Staring and Grinfor the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be any thing comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his brokendown Rake in the last plate but one of the Rake's Progress*, where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play" will not do."? but withal what a mass of woe is here Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, ac The first face perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression. That which comes next to it, 1 think, is the jaded morning countenance of the Debauchee in the Second Plate of the Marriage Alamode, which lectures on the vanity of pleasure as audibly as any thing in Ecclesiastes. coffin to gaze upon the corpse, with a face which indicates a perfect negation of all goodness or womanhoodthe hypocrite Parson and his demure partner all the fiendish group-to a thoughtful mind present a moral emblem more affecting than if the poor friendless carcase had been depicted as thrown out to the woods, where wolves had assisted at its obsequies, itself furnishing forth its own funeral banquet. It is easy to laugh at such incongruities as are met together in this picture, incongruous objects being of the very essence of laughter,-but surely the laugh is far different in its kind from that thoughtless species to which we are moved by mere farce and grotesque. We laugh when Ferdinand Count Fathom, at the first sight of the white cliffs of Britain, feels his heart year with filial fundmess towards the land of his progenitors, which he is coming to fleece and plunder,—we smile at the exquisite irony of the passage, but if we are not led on by such passages to some more salutary feeling than laughter, we are very negligent perusers of them in book or picture. It is the fashion with those who cry up the great Historical School in this country, at the head of which Sir Joshua Reynolds is placed, to exclude Hogarth from that school, as an artist of an inferior and vulgar class. Those persons seem to me to confound the painting of subjects in common or vulgar life with the being a vulgar artist. The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture, would alone unvulgarize every subject which he might choose. Let us take the lowest of his subjects, the print called Gin Lane. Here is plenty of poverty and low stuff to disgust upon a superficial view; and accordingly, a cold spectator feels himself immediately disgusted and repelled. I have seen many turn away from it, not being able to bear it. The same persons would perhaps have looked with great complacency upon Poussin's celebrated picture of the Plague at Athens *. Disease, and Death, and bewildering Terror, in Athenian garments, are endurable, and come, as the delicate critics express it, within" the limits of pleasurable sensation." But the scenes of their own St Giles's, delineated by their own countryman, are too shocking to think of. Yet if we could abstract our minds from the fascinating colours of the picture, and forget the coarse execution (in some respects) of the print, intended as it was to be a cheap plate, accessible to the poorer sort of people, for whose instruction it was done, I think we could have no hesitation in conferring the palm of superior genius upon Hogarth, comparing this work of his with Poussin's picture. There is more of imagination in it-that power which draws all things to one, which makes things, animate and inanimate, beings with their attributes, subjects and their accessories, take one colour, and serve to one effect. Every thing in the print, to use a vulgar expression, tells. Every part is full of" strange images of death." It is perfectly amazing and astounding to look at. Not only the two prominent figures, the woman and the half-dead man, which are as terrible as any thing which Michael Angelo ever drew, but every thing else in the print contributes to bewilder and stupefy, the very houses, as I heard a friend of mine express it, tumbling all about in various directions, seem drunkseem absolutely reeling from the effect of that diabolical spirit of phrenzy which goes forth over the whole composition.-To shew the poetical and almost prophetical conception in the artist, one little circumstance may |