than'- Here," Spence says, "St. | garbage of the gutter. Poor Pope's John sunk his head, and lost his voice in tears." The sob which finishes the epitaph is finer than words. It is the cloak thrown over the father's face in the famous Greek picture, which hides the grief and heightens it. figure was an easy one for those clumsy caricaturists to draw. Any stupid hand could draw a hunchback, and write Pope underneath. They did. A libel was published against Pope, with such a frontispiece. This kind of rude jesting was an evidence not only of an ill nature, but a dull one. When a child makes a pun, or a lout breaks out into a laugh, it is some very obvious combination of words, or discrepancy of objects, which provokes the infantine satirist, or tickles the boorish wag; and many of Pope's revilers laughed, not so much because they were wicked, as because they knew no better. In Johnson's "Life of Pope" you will find described, with rather a malicious minuteness, some of the personal habits and infirmities of the great little Pope. His body was crooked, he was so short that it was necessary to raise his chair in order to place him on a level with other people at table.* He was sewed up in a buckram suit every morning, and required a nurse like a child. His contemporaries reviled these misfortunes Without the utmost sensibility, with a strange acrimony, and made Pope could not have been the poet he his poor deformed person the butt for was; and through his life, however many a bolt of heavy wit. The face- much he protested that he disregarded tious Mr. Dennis, in speaking of him, their abuse, the coarse ridicule of his says, "If you take the first letter of opponents stung and tore him. One of Mr. Alexander Pope's Christian | Cibber's pamphlets coming into Pope's name, and the first and last letters of hands, whilst Richardson the painter his surname, you have A. P. E.” was with him, Pope turned round and Pope catalogues, at the end of the said, "These things are my diverDunciad, with a rueful precision, sions; " and Richardson, sitting by other pretty names, besides Ape, whilst Pope perused the libel, said he which Dennis called him. That great saw his features "writhing with ancritic pronounced Mr. Pope was a guish." little ass, a fool, a coward, a Papist, and therefore a hater of Scripture, and so forth. It must be remembered that the pillory was a flourishing and popular institution in those days. Authors stood in it in the body sometimes and dragged their enemies thither morally, hooted them with foul abuse, and assailed them with How little human nature changes! Can't one see that little figure? Can't one fancy one is reading Horace? Can't one fancy one is speaking of to-day? The tastes and sensibilities of Pope, which led him to cultivate the society of persons of fine manners, or wit, or taste, or beauty, caused him to shrink equally from that shabby and boister ous crew which formed the rank and file of literature in his time and he was as unjust to these men as they to him. The delicate little creature sickened at habits and company which were quite tolerable to robuster men: and in the famous feud between Pope and the Dunces, and without attributing any peculiar wrong to either, one can quite understand how the two parties should so hate each other. As I fancy, it was a sort of necessity that when Pope's triumph passed, Mr. not the " Dunciad;" and I believe in Addison and his men should look | ness, and held up those wretched rather contemptuously down on it shifts and rags to public ridicule. It from their balcony; so it was natural was Pope that has made generations for Dennis and Tibbald, and Web- of the reading world (delighted with ster and Cibber, and the worn and the mischief, as who would hungry pressmen in the crowd below, be that reads it?) believe that author to howl at him and assail him. And and wretch, author and rags, author Pope was more savage to Grub Street and dirt, author and drink, gin, cowthan Grub Street was to Pope. The heel, tripe, poverty, duns, bailiffs, thong with which he lashed them squalling children and clamorous was dreadful; he fired upon that landladies, were always associated howling crew such shafts of flame and together. The condition of authorpoison, he slew and wounded so fierce-ship began to fall from the days of ly, that in reading the "Dunciad" and the prose lampoons of Pope, one feels disposed to side against the ruthless little tyrant, at least to pity those wretched folks upon whom he was so unmerciful. It was Pope, and Swift to aid him, who established among us the Grub Street tradition. He revels in base descriptions of poor men's want; he gloats over poor Dennis's garret, and flannel nightcap, and red stockings; he gives instructions how to find Curll's authors, the historian | at the tallow-chandler's under the blind arch in Petty France, the two translators in bed together, the poet in the cock-loft in Budge Row, whose Xlandlady keeps the ladder. It was Pope, I fear, who contributed, more | than any man who ever lived, to depreciate the literary calling. It was not an unprosperous one before that time, as we have seen; at least there were great prizes in the profession which had made Addison a Minister, and Prior an Ambassador, and Steele a Commissioner, and Swift all but a Bishop. The profession of letters was ruined by that libel of the "Dunciad." If authors were wretched and poor before, if some of them lived in haylofts, of which their landladies kept the ladders, at least nobody came to disturb them in their straw; if three of them had but one coat between them, the two remained invisible in the garret, the third, at any rate, appeared decently at the coffeehouse, and paid his twopence like a gentleman. It was Pope that dragged forcible melodious manner, the concludinto light all this poverty and meaning lines of the Dunciad."— BOSWELL, "She comes, she comes! the sable throne Of Night primeval and of Chaos old; As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain As Argus' eyes, by Hermes' wand oppressed, Closed, one by one, to everlasting rest; Thus, at her fell approach and secret might, Art after Art goes out, and all is night. See skulking Faith to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head; "He (Johnson) repeated to us, in his Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven with armies of slaves at his back. It before, Shrinks to her second cause and is no Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine. Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored, Light dies before thy uncreating word; Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all."* is a wonderful and victorious single combat, in that great battle, which has always been waging since society began. In speaking of a work of consuinmate art one does not try to show what it actually is, for that were vain ; but what it is like, and what are the sensations produced in the mind of him wlto views it. And in considering Pope's admirable career, I am forced into similitudes drawn from In these astonishing lines Pope other courage and greatness, and into reaches, I think, to the very greatest comparing him with those who height which his sublime art has at- achieved triumphs in actual war. tained, and shows himself the equal think of the works of young Pope of all poets of all times. It is the as I do of the actions of young Bobrightest ardor, the loftiest assertion naparte or young Nelson. In their of truth, the most generous wisdom, common life you will find frailties illustrated by the noblest poetic fig- and meannesses, as great as the vices ure, and spoken in words the aptest, and follies of the meanest men. But grandest, and most harmonious. It in the presence of the great occasion, is heroic courage speaking: a splen- the great soul flashes out, and condid declaration of righteous wrath quers transcendent. In thinking of and war. It is the gage flung down, the splendor of Pope's young victoand the silver trumpet ringing defi- ries, of his merit, unequalled as his ance to falsehood and tyranny, deceit, renown, I hail and salute the achievdulness, superstition. It is Truth, ing genius and do homage to the the champion, shining and intrepid, pen of a hero. and fronting the great world-tyrant HOGARTH, SMOLLETT, AND FIELDING. I SUPPOSE, as long as novels last through a certain number of pages, is and authors aim at interesting their sure to be discomfited in the last public, there must always be in the volume, when justice overtakes him story a virtuous and gallant hero, a and honest folks come by their own.. wicked monster his opposite, and a There never was perhaps a greatly pretty girl who finds a champion; popular story but this simple plot was bravery and. virtue conquer beauty; carried through it: mere satiric wit and vice, after seeming to triumph is addressed to a class of readers and "Mr. Langton informed me that he thinkers quite different to those simonce related to Johnson (on the authority ple souls who laugh and weep over of Spence), that Pope himself admired the novel. I fancy very few ladies these lines so much that when he repeated indeed, for instance, could be brought might, sir,' said Johnson, for they are to like "Gulliver" heartily, and noble lines."-J. BOSWELL, junior. (putting the coarseness and difference them his voice faltered. And well it of manners out of the question) to relish the wonderful satire of "Jonathan Wild." In that strange apologue, the author takes for a hero the greatest rascal, coward, traitor, tyrant, hypocrite, that his wit and experience, both large in this matter, could enable him to devise or depict; he accompanies this villain through all the actions of his life, with a grinning deference and a wonderful mock respect and doesn't leave him, till he is dangling at the gallows, when the satirist makes him a low bow, and wishes the scoundrel good day. It was not by satire of this sort, or by scorn and contempt, that Hogarth achieved his vast popularity and acquired his reputation.* His art is quite simple, he speaks popular parables to interest simple hearts, and to inspire them with pleasure or *Coleridge speaks of the "beautiful female faces" in Hogarth's pictures, "in whom," he says, "the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet." The Friend. "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. "The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture would almost unvulgarize every subject which he might choose. "I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some in their nature repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face, they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the circumstances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that tedium quotidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett and Fielding."CHARLES LAMB. "It has been observed that Hogarth's pictures are exceedingly unlike any other other representations of the same kind of subjects-that they form a class, and have a character, peculiar to themselves. may be worth while to consider in what this general distinction consists. It "In the first place, they are, in the strictest sense, historical pictures; and if what Fielding says be true, that his novel of Tom Jones' ought to be regarded as an epic prose-poem, because it contained a regular development of fable, manners, character, and passion, the compositions of Hogarth will, in like manner, be found to have a higher claim to the title of epic pictures than many which have of late arrogated that denomination to themselves. When we say that Hogarth treated his subject historically, we mean that his works represent the manners and humors of mankind in action, and their characters by varied expression. Every thing in his pictures has life and motion in it. Not only does the business of the scene never stand still, but every feature and muscle is put into full play; the exact feeling of the moment is brought out, and carried to its utmost height, and then instantly seized and stamped on the canvas foreve. The expression is always taken en passant, in a state of progress or change, and, as it were, at the salient point. His figures are not like the back-ground on which they are painted: even the pictures on the wall have a peculiar look of their own. Again, with the rapidity, variety, and scope of history, Hogarth's heads have all the reality and correctness of portraits. He gives the extremes of character and expression, but he gives them with perfect truth and accuracy. This is, in fact, what distinguishes his compositions from all others of the same kind, that they are equally remote from caricature, and from mere still life. . . . His faces go to the very verge of caricature, and yet never (we believe in any single instance) go beyond it." - HAZLITT. neither the less because they are so artless and honest. "It was a maxim of Dr. Harrison's," Fielding says, in "Amelia,"-speaking of the benevolent divine and philosopher who represents the good principle in that novel that no man can descend below himself, in doing any act which may contribute to protect an innocent person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows." The moralists of that age had no compunction, you see; they had not begun to be sceptical about the theory of punishment, and thought that the hanging of a thief was a spectacle for edification. Masters sent their apprentices, fathers took their children, to see Jack Sheppard or Jonathan Wild hanged, and it was as undoubting subscribers to this moral law, that Fielding wrote and Hogarth painted. Except in one instance, where, in the mad-house scene in "The Rake's Progress," the girl whom he has ruined is represented as still tending and weeping over him in his insanity, a glimpse of pity for his rogues never seems to enter honest Hogarth's mind. There's not the slightest doubt in the breast of the jolly Draco. 66 The famous set of pictures called Marriage à la Mode," and which are now exhibited in the National Gallery in London, contains the most important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedics. The care and method with which the moral grounds of these pictures are laid is as remarkable as the wit and skill of the observing and dexterous artist. He has to describe the negotiations for a marriage pending between the daughter of a rich citizen Alderman and young Lord Viscount Squanderfield, the dissipated son of a gouty old Earl. Pride and pomposity appear in every accessory surrounding the Earl. He sits in gold lace and velvet as how should such an Earl wear any thing but velvet and gold lace? His coronet is everywhere: on his footstool, on which reposes one gouty toe turned out; on the sconces and looking-glasses; on the dogs; on his lordship's very crutches; on his great chair of state and the great baldaquin behind him; under which he sits pointing majestically to his pedigree, which shows that his race is sprung from the loins of William the Con queror, and confronting the old Al derman from the City, who has mounted his sword for the occasion, and wears his Alderman's chain, and has brought a bag full of money, mortgage-deeds, and thousand-pound notes, for the arrangement of the transaction pending between them. Whilst the steward (a Methodist therefore a hypocrite and cheat for Hogarth scorned a Papist and a Dissenter) is negotiating between the old couple, their children sit together, united but apart. My lord is admiring his countenance in the glass, while his bride is twiddling her marriage-ring on her pocket-handkerchief, and listening with rueful countenance to Counsellor Silvertongue, who has been drawing the settlements. The girl is pretty, but the painter, with a curious watchfulness, has taken care to give her a likeness to her father; as in the young Viscount's face you sec a resemblance to the Earl, his noble sire. The sense of the coronet pervades the picture, as it is supposed to do the mind of its wearer. The pictures round the room are sly hints indicating the situation of the parties about to marry. A martyr is led to the fire; Andromeda is offered to sacrifice; Judith is going to slay Holofernes. There is the ancestor of the house (in the picture it is the Earl himself as a young man), with a comet over his head, indicating that the career of the family is to be brilliant and brief. In the second picture, the old lord must be dead, for Madam has now the Countess's coronet over her bed and toilet-glass, and sits listening to that dangerous Counsellor Silvertongue, whose portrait now actually hangs up in her room, whilst the counsellor takes his ease on the sofa by her side, evidently the familiar of the house, and the confidant of the |
