When we compare the expression in subjects which so fairly admit of comparison, and find the superiority so clearly to remain with Hogarth, shall the mere contemptible difference of the scene of it being laid, in the one case, in our Fleet or King's Bench Prison, and, in the other, in the State Prison of Pisa, or the bedroom of a cardinal,--or that the subject of the one has never been authenticated, and the other is matter of history,--so weigh down the real points, of the comparison, as to induce us to rank the artist who has chosen the one scene or subject (though confessedly inferior in that which constitutes the soul of his art) in a class from which we exclude the better genius (who has happened to make choice of the other) with something like disgrace ?[2] [Footnote 1: The first perhaps in all Hogarth for serious expression.

That which comes next to it, I 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 anything in Ecclesiastes.] [Footnote 2: Sir Joshua Reynolds, somewhere in his Lectures, speaks of the _presumption_ of Hogarth in attempting the grand style in painting, by which he means his choice of certain Scripture subjects.
Hogarth's excursions into Holy Land were not very numerous, but what he has left us in this kind have at least this merit, that they have expression of _some sort or other_ in them,--the _Child Moses before Pharaoh's Daughter_, for instance: which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds's _Repose in Egypt_, painted for Macklin's Bible, where for a Madonna he has substituted a sleepy, insensible, unmotherly girl, one so little worthy to have been selected as the Mother of the Saviour, that she seems to have neither heart nor feeling to entitle her to become a mother at all.

But indeed the race of Virgin Mary painters seems to have been cut up, root and branch, at the Reformation.

Our artists are too good Protestants to give life to that admirable commixture of maternal tenderness with reverential awe and wonder approaching to worship, with which the Virgin Mothers of L.da Vinci and Raphael (themselves by their divine countenances inviting men to worship) contemplate the union of the two natures in the person of their Heaven-born Infant.] _The Boys under Demoniacal Possession_ of Raphael and Domenichino, by what law of classification are we bound to assign them to belong to the great style in painting, and to degrade into an inferior class the Rake of Hogarth when he is the Madman in the Bedlam scene?
I am sure he is far more impressive than either.

It is a face which no one that has seen can easily forget.