"----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.