Our intellectual natures love the mirror which gives them back their own likenesses.

The mental eye will not bend long with delight upon vacancy.
Another line of eternal separation between Hogarth and the common painters of droll or burlesque subjects, with whom he is often confounded, is the sense of beauty, which in the most unpromising subjects seems never wholly to have deserted him.

"Hogarth himself," says Mr.Coleridge,[1] from whom I have borrowed this observation, speaking of a scene which took place at Ratzeburg, "never drew a more ludicrous distortion, both of attitude and physiognomy, than this effect occasioned: nor was there wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same Hogarth, _in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty which belonged to him as a poet_, so often and so gladly introduces as the central figure in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figure (such is the power of true genius) neither acts nor is meant to act as a contrast; but diffuses through all and over each of the group a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and even when the attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and _thus prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature, or the foibles or humors of our fellow-men, from degenerating into the heart-poison of contempt or hatred_." To the beautiful females in Hogarth, which Mr.
C.has pointed out, might be added, the frequent introduction of children (which Hogarth seems to have taken a particular delight in) into his pieces.

They have a singular effect in giving tranquillity and a portion of their own innocence to the subject.

The baby riding in its mother's lap in the _March to Finchley_, (its careless innocent face placed directly behind the intriguing time-furrowed countenance of the treason-plotting French priest,) perfectly sobers the whole of that tumultuous scene.