When I first saw the “George II. and his Family” at the Dublin National Gallery, I had a thrill similar to that I experienced when I first saw “Miss Rich.” It is an unfinished sketch, made when Hogarth was Sergeant Painter. Looking at it, again we wonder what heights this man might have reached had he received the encouragement that is given to eminent painters of our day. But, as it was, in spite of everything, Hogarth boxed the compass, and when he wrote “genius is nothing but labour and diligence,” the “ingenious Mr. Hogarth,” as Fielding called him, did not take into account that something else (which is genius) that was born in him, and that he struggled to express, and succeeded in expressing so triumphantly. And the end of all was “The Bathos,” his last design, humorous, cynical, his finis, inscribed to his old enemies, “the dealers in dark pictures.” Game to the end was William Hogarth! VI SOME PICTURES IN NATIONAL COLLECTIONS If it interests you to study the variety of Hogarth’s achievement in paint, his ladder-like progress, now up, now down, visit the Hogarth Room at the National Gallery and turn from the prim and meticulous handling of “A Family Group” (No. 1153) to the dash and brilliancy of his “Sister” (No. 1663); from “Sigismonda Mourning over the Heart of Guiscardo,” painted late in life, in one of his reactionary, “grand manner” moods, a commission that the patron, Sir Richard Grosvenor, refused to take; turn from academic, tear-sprinkled Sigismonda to the sparkle and impulse of “The Shrimp Girl.” I have already expressed my admiration for this amazing sketch, and Sir Walter Armstrong, in his technical analysis of the painting of “Hogarth’s Sister,” has said all there is to say on the vivacious and original way in which Hogarth handled this sympathetic subject, and the skill with which he has, as it were, substituted light and colour for paint. Sir Walter notes that the system of colour is that followed by Eugene Delacroix a century later, who was under the impression that he was the innovator; that “the high lights and the deep shadows are in each case two primaries, which unite to form a half tone. The dress which produces the effect of yellow is yellow in the high lights, red in the deepest shadows, and orange in the transitions; so with the scarf, the three tints of which are yellow, green, and blue.” [Illustration: PLATE VII.--SIMON FRASER, LORD LOVAT, 1666-1747 (In the National Portrait Gallery, London) Here is the chief of the Fraser clan (patriot or traitor, which you like), a study in reds, browns, corpulency and craftiness, in the act of narrating some of his adventures, or perhaps detailing the various Highland clans on his fingers. Lord Lovat was executed for high treason. Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get “a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up.”]