The engravings tell the fatal, foolish story; but to connoisseurs the quality and clarity of the paint is the thing. What could be more exquisite than the characterisation of the lady in Scene II., “Shortly after Marriage,” her pretty, dissolute, provocative face, the abandon of her figure, and the haplessness of the peer, too bored and tired after his night’s debauch even to think of remorse. The clock marks twenty minutes after twelve in the morning, the candles beneath the portraits of the four saints on the wall of the inner room are guttering, a dog sniffs at a lady’s cap peeping from the husband’s pocket, and the book protruding from the coat of the old steward is titled “Regeneration.” Hogarth never stayed his hand. The details are innumerable, amusing, italicised. I look and smile quietly, returning always to the characterisation of those two figures, the husband and wife, so delicately observed, so exquisitely painted. In the middle of the wall at the National Gallery, facing the “Marriage à la Mode” series, painted in the same year when he was forty-eight, is Hogarth’s own portrait with his dog Trump. Blue-eyed, watchful, sturdy, wearing a fur cap, with a scar over his left eye, he has, indeed, “a sort of knowing, jockey look.” He was not a modest man. Why should he have been? In this portrait he allows himself great company. The oval rests on three volumes labelled “Shakespeare,” “Milton,” and “Swift,” and in the lower left corner, drawn on a palette in the corner, is a serpentine curve with these lines under it, “The Line of Beauty,” the flaunting inscription which gave rise to his book, “The Analysis of Beauty.” “No Egyptian hieroglyphic ever amused more than it [the serpentine curve] did for a time,” he tells us. The requests for a solution of the enigma were so numerous that he wrote “The Analysis of Beauty” to explain the symbol. The book, although shrewd in parts, was a dire failure. “The world of professional scoffers and virtuosi fell joyously upon its obscurities and incoherencies.” The obscurities may be divined from the text of the book, which contains “the not very definite axiom,” as Mr. Dobson calls it, attributed to Michael Angelo--“that a figure should be always Pyramidal, Serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three.” I pause to take breath, and refresh myself with an epigram that Hogarth wrote _apropos_ this ill-starred “solution of the enigma.” “What!--a book, and by Hogarth! then twenty to ten, All he gain’d by the _pencil_, he’ll _lose_ by the pen.” “Perhaps it may be so--howe’er, miss or hit, He will publish--_here goes_--_it’s double or quit_.” It was an old plate of his Portrait with dog Trump, on which the “Line of Beauty” appears, that he converted into “The Bruiser Charles Churchill” design, his answer to Churchill’s “most virulent and vindictive satire,” called “An Epistle to William Hogarth.”