But of the severer class of Hogarth's performances, enough, I trust, has been said to show that they do not merely shock and repulse; that there is in them the "scorn of vice" and the "pity" too; something to touch the heart, and keep alive the sense of moral beauty; the "lacrymae rerum," and the sorrowing by which the heart is made better.

If they be bad things, then is satire and tragedy a bad thing; let us proclaim at once an age of gold, and sink the existence of vice and misery in our speculations: let us "-- --wink, and shut our apprehensions up From common sense of what men were and are:" let us _make believe_ with the children, that everybody is good and happy; and, with Dr.Swift, write panegyrics upon the world.
But that larger half of Hogarth's works, which were painted more for entertainment than instruction (though such was the suggestiveness of his mind that there is always something to be learnt from them), his humorous scenes,--are they such as merely to disgust and set us against our species?
The confident assertions of such a man as I consider the late Mr.
Barry to have been, have that weight of authority in them which staggers at first hearing, even a long preconceived opinion.

When I read his pathetic admonition concerning the shortness of life, and how much better the little leisure of it were laid out upon "that species of art which is employed about the amiable and the admirable;" and Hogarth's "method," proscribed as a "dangerous or worthless pursuit," I began to think there was something in it; that I might have been indulging all my life a passion for the works of this artist, to the utter prejudice of my taste and moral sense; but my first convictions gradually returned, a world of good-natured English faces came up one by one to my recollection, and a glance at the matchless _Election Entertainment_, which I have the happiness to have hanging up in my parlor, subverted Mr.Barry's whole theory in an instant.
In that inimitable print (which in my judgment as far exceeds the more known and celebrated _March to Finchley_, as the best comedy exceeds the best farce that ever was written), let a person look till he be saturated, and when he has done wondering at the inventiveness of genius which could bring so many characters (more than thirty distinct classes of face) into a room and set them down at table together, or otherwise dispose them about, in so natural a manner, engage them in so many easy sets and occupations, yet all partaking of the spirit of the occasion which brought them together, so that we feel that nothing but an election time could have assembled them; having no central figure or principal group, (for the hero of the piece, the Candidate, is properly set aside in the levelling indistinction of the day, one must look for him to find him,) nothing to detain the eye from passing from part to part, where every part is alike instinct with life,--for here are no furniture-faces, no figures brought in to fill up the scene like stage choruses, but all dramatis personae; when he shall have done wondering at all these faces so strongly charactered, yet finished with the accuracy of the finest miniature; when he shall have done admiring the numberless appendages of the scene, those gratuitous doles which rich genius flings into the heap when it has already done enough, the over-measure which it delights in giving, as if it felt its stores were exhaustless; the dumb rhetoric of the scenery,--for tables, and chairs, and joint-stools in Hogarth are living and significant things; the witticisms that are expressed by words (all artists but Hogarth have failed when they have endeavored to combine two mediums of expression, and have introduced words into their pictures), and the unwritten numberless little allusive pleasantries that are scattered about; the work that is going on in the scene, and beyond it, as is made visible to the "eye of mind," by the mob which chokes up the doorway, and the sword that has forced an entrance before its master; when he shall have sufficiently admired this wealth of genius, let him fairly say what is the _result_ left on his mind.

Is it an impression of the vileness and worthlessness of his species?
or is it not the general feeling which remains, after the individual faces have ceased to act sensibly on his mind, a _kindly one in favor of his species ?_ was not the general air of the scene wholesome?
did it do the heart hurt to be among it?
Something of a riotous spirit to be sure is there, some worldly-mindedness in some of the faces, a Doddingtonian smoothness which does not promise any superfluous degree of sincerity in the fine gentleman who has been the occasion of calling so much good company together; but is not the general cast of expression in the faces of the good sort?
do they not seem cut out of the _good old rock_, substantial English honesty?
would one fear treachery among characters of their expression?
or shall we call their honest mirth and seldom-returning relaxation by the hard names of vice and profligacy?
That poor country fellow, that is grasping his staff (which, from that difficulty of feeling themselves at home which poor men experience at a feast, he has never parted with since he came into the room), and is enjoying with a relish that seems to fit all the capacities of his soul the slender joke, which that facetious wag his neighbor is practising upon the gouty gentleman, whose eyes the effort to suppress pain has made as round as rings--does it shock the "dignity of human nature" to look at that man, and to sympathize with him in the seldom-heard joke which has unbent his careworn, hard-working visage, and drawn iron smiles from it?
or with that full-hearted cobbler, who is honoring with the grasp of an honest fist the unused palm of that annoyed patrician, whom the license of the time has seated next him?
I can see nothing "dangerous" in the contemplation of such scenes as this, or the _Enraged Musician_, or the _Southwark Fair_, or twenty other pleasant prints which come crowding in upon my recollection, in which the restless activities, the diversified bents and humors, the blameless peculiarities of men, as they deserve to be called, rather than their "vices and follies," are held up in a laughable point of view.

All laughter is not of a dangerous or soul-hardening tendency.
There is the petrifying sneer of a demon which excludes and kills Love, and there is the cordial laughter of a man which implies and cherishes it.