Lesser artists show everything 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 this of Hogarth, the name of a grand serious composition.
We are forever deceiving ourselves with names and theories.

We call one man a great historical painter, because he has taken 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 shown 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 Reynolds, whether in the countenances of his _Staring_ and _Grinning Despair_, which he has given us for the faces of Ugolino and dying Beaufort, there be anything comparable to the expression which Hogarth has put into the face of his broken-down rake in the last plate but one of the _Rake's Progress_,[1] where a letter from the manager is brought to him to say that his play "will not do ?" Here all is easy, natural, undistorted, but withal what a mass of woe is here accumulated!--the long history of a misspent life is compressed into the countenance as plainly as the series of plates before had told it; here is no attempt at Gorgonian looks, which are to freeze the beholder--no grinning at the antique bedposts--no face-making, or consciousness of the presence of spectators in or out of the picture, but grief kept to a man's self, a face retiring from notice with the shame which great anguish sometimes brings with it,--a final leave taken of hope,--the coming on of vacancy and stupefaction,--a beginning alienation of mind looking like tranquillity.

Here is matter for the mind of the beholder to feed on for the hour together,--matter to feed and fertilize the mind.

It is too real to admit one thought about the power of the artist who did it.