To traverse continents in search of antique paintings, explore caverns for mutilated sculpture, and measure the proportions of a statue with mathematical precision, was not the boast of William Hogarth. The _Temple of Nature_ was his academy, and his topography the map of the human mind. Disdaining to copy or translate, he left the superior class of beings that people the canvas of Poussin and Michael Angelo to their admirers; selected his images from his own country, and gave them with a truth, energy, and variety of character,[39] ever appropriate, and invariably original. Considering his peculiar powers, it is fortunate for his fame that he was a native of Britain. In Switzerland, the scenery is romantic,--the rocks are stupendous; in Italy, the models of art are elevated and majestic,--the ruins of ancient Greece still continue a school of architecture and proportion;--but in England, and in England alone, we have every variety of character that separates man from man. To these he resorted, and rarely attempted to _heighten nature_, either by ideal or elevated beauty; for though he had the eye, he had not the wing of an eagle; when he attempted to soar, particles of his native clay clung to his pinions, and retarded his flight. His engravings, though coarse, are forcible in a degree scarcely to be paralleled. Every figure is drawn from the quarry of nature; and, though seldom polished, is always animated. He has been accused of grossness in some of his single figures: but the general vein of his wit is better calculated to make the man of humour smile than the humourist laugh;--has the air of Cervantes rather than Rabelais,--of Fielding rather than Smollett. I do not know in what class to place his pictured stories. They are too much crowded with little incidents for the dignity of history; for tragedy, are too comic; yet have a termination which forbids us to call them comedies. Being selected from life, they present to us the absurdities, crimes, punishments, and vicissitudes of man: to-day, basking in the bright beams of prosperity; to-morrow, sunk in the gloom of comfortless despair. Be it recorded to his honour, that their invariable tendency is the promotion of virtue, and the diffusion of such a spirit as tends to make men industrious, humane, and happy. If some of the incidents are thought too ludicrous, and a few of the scenes rather border on the licentious, let it be remembered, that since they were engraved the _standard of delicacy_ has been somewhat altered: that species of wit which this sentimental and _double-refined_ age deems too much debased for common currency, was then, with a still larger portion of alloy, the sterling coin of the kingdom.