The serious spectator may hold his peace before Hogarth’s pictures, and I am quite prepared to admit that never a tear comes at Hogarth’s call, or, for the matter of that, at the call of any other artist, great or small. Plays or books may make us cry, but pictures never. Alfred Stevens remarked that. The serious spectator, if he has been well brought up, certainly holds his peace before Hogarth’s pictures, that is his paintings, but if he be a connoisseur his peace passes into joy at the pure colour, the fresh technique, the impulse and the vision of this great painter, whose fate it was to be regarded for so long as a mere moralist, and to be refused “the highest heaven of art,” where Raphael and Correggio--yes! and the eclectics of Bologna--reigned. But the world has grown older and taste has improved, has changed very much since the day of the “notorious Mr. Trusler,” whose name appears, with two other eighteenth-century authors, on the title-page of another book on Hogarth that I possess. I bought it years ago for a few pence at a second-hand book shop. It is a “popular” edition, undated, written and compiled by John Trusler, John Nichols, and John Ireland, and is no doubt based upon “The Works of Mr. Hogarth Moralised (1768), with Dedication by John Trusler.” It was Mrs. Hogarth herself who, after her husband’s death, “engaged a Gentleman to explain each Print and moralise on it in such a Manner as to make them as well instructive as entertaining.” Many in their youth must have gained their knowledge of Hogarth from this curious, informing volume, or from one of the many other compilations based upon the 1768 edition. The title of my volume precisely describes it--“The Works of William Hogarth: One hundred and fifty plates with Explanations.” On each left-hand page is the picture, filling the page; on each right-hand page is the description and explanation, usually filling the page. The blocks are worn, travesties of the original prints; the letterpress is no doubt just what Mrs. Hogarth desired when she “engaged a Gentleman to explain each Print and moralise upon it.” The book is a monument to Hogarth’s fecundity as draughtsman, observer, and satirist, but it gives no hint of his capacity as painter. Here is the dainty “Marriage à la Mode” pageant in a series of battered _cliches_; here is “The Shrimp Girl,” a mere dull illustration of a type in the same _genre_ as “The Milk Maid” and “The Pie Man.” I knew them well as a youth under the moral guidance of the Rev. Dr. Trusler; knew them without love, without emotion. Then one day at the National Gallery I saw the paintings of the “Marriage,” “The Shrimp Girl,” and his “Sister,” saw “Polly Peachum” and “Peg Woffington,” and himself painting the Comic Muse, and lo! I discovered that Hogarth was a painter, here bold, there exquisite, according to the demands of the subject.