The living rooms, one on the ground floor and three on the first floor, are now hung with engravings of his works--fine proofs, ranging from his first important essays, the unamusing “Burlington Gate” and the masterly “Hudibras” series, published before he was thirty, to the valedictory “Bathos.” To those who know Hogarth only through the piracies of his engravings and the worn impressions that have been scattered through the land, these brilliant proofs are a revelation. Rich, velvety, direct and accomplished in technique, the subjects have little of the amenities that moderns have been trained to expect in art-productions of a popular kind. Hogarth knew his own mind and his public. His moralities, he said, “were addrest to hard hearts. I have preferred leaving them _hard_, and giving the effect, by a quick touch, to rendering them languid and feeble by fine strokes and soft engraving, which require more care and practice than can often be attained, except by a man of a very quiet turn of mind.” He was not a man of a “quiet turn of mind.” He was a fighter, and an artist who never spared himself, and who went straight to his goal without circumlocution. With a few strokes he could give lasciviousness to a lip, desire to an eye, scorn and contempt often, nobility rarely. His Industrious Apprentice is merely bland, merely smug. But as a technician he was superb within his limits. The plates bearing the words, “Inscribed, Printed, Engraved and Published by William Hogarth,” are magnificent. In them Hogarth the artist and Hogarth the fighter and scorner mingle. I turn from the sentiment of “The Distressed Poet,” from the force of “The Enraged Musician,” from the daintiness of the second scene of “Marriage à la Mode,” to the contempt and scorn of “Portrait of John Wilkes,” and to his amazing misunderstanding of Rembrandt expressed in his burlesque of his own “Paul Before Felix,” with this legend: “Design’d and etch’d in the rediculous manner of Rembrant [the spelling is his own], by William Hogarth.” But what a man he was! sure of himself, certain of his power. His original sketches, many of which are at the British Museum, antedate Rowlandson, whose manner may have been founded on Hogarth. Enduring to the end, Hogarth busied himself towards the close of his life retouching and repairing his plates, one of which, “The Bench,” he was working upon at Chiswick the day before his death. It is said that he had premonition of a coming breakdown. “Very weak, but remarkably cheerful,” he was conveyed on October 25, 1764, from Chiswick to his town house in Leicester Fields, and if _in extremis_ we do see, as in a timeless vision, the run of our past lives, Hogarth in that jolting journey through eighteenth-century London, an ill man of sixty-seven, may have recalled the salient scenes of his rushing life.