There are three works by him at the National Portrait Gallery--the early, unimportant “Committee of the House of Commons examining Bambridge”; the strong self-portrait, “Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse”; and that specimen of relentless and amusing characterisation, “Simon, Lord Lovat, painted by Hogarth before his Execution for High Treason.” Hogarth journeyed to St. Albans to get “a fair view of his Lordship before he was locked up.” Here is the chief of the Fraser clan to the life (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. This masterful, pawky Jacobite was tried before his peers in 1747, found guilty, and beheaded on Tower Hill. We know more of him from Hogarth’s picture than from a whole book of documents and descriptions. And of all self-portraits is there one more self-revealing than “Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse”? He was then sixty-one. With his short-cropped grey hair he looks like a pugilist, and a pugilist he might have been had not Nature, so casual, so inexplicable in her gifts, chosen to plant the seeds of real artistic genius in the soul of belligerent, brave, preposterously British William Hogarth. VII THE SOANE MUSEUM AND FOUNDLING HOSPITAL The “Picture Room” of the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, that hushed, dim, small apartment, lighted by a lantern light, approached by a glazed door from the crowded corridor of this dignified house, crowded to excess with works of art collected by Sir John Soane (1753-1837), is virtually a Hogarth Room. You enter, and facing you, hung frame to frame, are the eight paintings illustrating “The Rake’s Progress,” purchased by Sir John Soane in 1802 for five hundred and seventy guineas. You turn to the left and your eyes alight upon Nos. 1 and 2 of the “Four Prints of an Election,” called “The Entertainment,” and “The Canvassing for Votes”; you turn to the right and there are the second pair, “The Polling,” and “The Chairing of the Member.” Reams have been written about these pictures. I will be reticent--space compels it--and content myself with quoting one word, the word “matchless,” used by Charles Lamb to describe the first of the Election series. There are passages of beauty in all the scenes, as in “The Rake’s Progress,” but I find so large a meal as twelve “pictur’d morals,” hustling each other, a little difficult to digest. The Hogarth surfeit, a well-known ailment, always assails me in this lantern-lighted room of the Soane Museum. Perhaps it is the obsession of the “movable planes.” Opening at a touch, the walls slide away and disclose more, more, and more works of art. But I do not suffer from Hogarth surfeit at the Foundling Hospital, over which his fatherly spirit ever seems to brood.