_The Cockpit_ represents a scene very common in those days, and contains many portraits. _The Election_ is a series of four scenes, published between 1755 and 1758, in which all the varied vices, humours, and passions of a contested election are admirably represented. The pictures of this series are in Sir John Soane's Museum, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Hogarth's last years were embittered by quarrels, those with Churchill and Wilkes being the most memorable. The publication in 1753 of his admirable book, called "The Analysis of Beauty," in which Hogarth tried to prove that a winding line is the Line of Beauty, produced much adverse criticism and many fierce attacks, which the painter could not take quietly. He was further annoyed by the censures passed on his picture of _Sigismunda_, now in the National Gallery, which he had painted in 1759 for Sir Richard Grosvenor, and which was returned on his hands. Two years previously Hogarth had been made Serjeant-Painter to the King. He did not live to hold this office long; on October 26th, 1764, the hand which had exposed the vices and follies of the day so truly, and yet with such humour, had ceased to move. Hogarth died in his house at Leicester Fields; he was buried in Chiswick Churchyard, where on his monument stands this epitaph by Garrick;-- "Farewel, great Painter of Mankind! Who reached the noblest point of Art; Whose _pictured Morals_ charm the Mind, And through the Eye correct the Heart. If Genius fire thee, Reader, stay; If _Nature_ touch thee, drop a Tear; If neither move thee, turn away, For HOGARTH'S honour'd dust lies here." And yet it is of this man that Walpole says, that "as a painter he has slender merit." Charles Lamb remarks wisely, in his fine essay on "The Genius and Character of Hogarth, that his chief design was by no means to raise a laugh." Of his prints, he says, "A set of severer satires (for they are not so much comedies, which they have been likened to, as they are strong and masculine satires), less mingled with anything of mere fun, were never written upon paper, or graven upon copper. They resemble Juvenal, or the satiric touches in _Timon of Athens_." [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. THE ROYAL ACADEMY AND ITS INFLUENCE.