Greuze and Hogarth have often been compared, but there are many essential differences between the two men. There was dissimilarity in their temperaments, and while Greuze has adopted the attitude of a mild-mannered Sabbath-school superintendent, towards those whose immorality he would correct, Hogarth, as Professor Muther has written, has "swung over this human animal the stout cudgel of morality in the manner of a sturdy policeman and Puritan _bourgeois_." Charles Normand explains the difference with some disregard for international amenity. Greuze, he says, "did not paint for the English, at once drunkards and theologians, maundering on through life, with a pot of gin in one hand and a Bible in the other." And yet Greuze is no Puritan, even when he preaches most. There is often an air of coquetry and voluptuousness in his most serious pictures. Charles Blanc has written that Greuze is a moralist who is passionately fond of beautiful shoulders, a preacher who loves to see and to reveal to us the bosoms of young girls; and Lady Dilke has pointed out that "even in _Un {38} Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_ ... the instinct which bade him associate with his lessons of grace and morality the stimulus of voluptuous charm has tempted him to give prominence to the girl whose thoughts are far away, and whose kerchief is torn just where it should hide the budding breast." But when criticism has said all it can say in dispraise of Greuze's pictures, even of his _genre_ pictures, it may be seen that Greuze was by temperament an artist. The melodramatic moralist was only part of the man and not the whole. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had "something of the Shorter-Catechist" in his constitution, and yet remains the most romantic and interesting figure of the latter-day world of letters. It need not be forgotten that in the most theatrical works of Greuze there are many beauties. There is often a figure in these otherwise imperfect pictures which indicates his love for the beautiful, and in some of his paintings, for instance in _Un Père de Famille qui lit la Bible à ses Enfants_, the melodramatic element, though present, is not obtrusive, and is more than compensated by the other qualities of tenderness and graceful composition. We may now consider the other class of Greuze's paintings, the heads of children, and it is in these that Greuze is seen at his best; it is in these that he redeems himself, and reveals more of the artist. To-day, though his other works are scarcely ever mentioned, his heads {39} of girls and boys are treasured in the most costly collections, and are known far and wide by means of photographs and other reproductions.