In Mr. Austin Dobson’s _Hogarth_, to which all students of that master are so deeply indebted, the following sentence concludes the list of “Prints of an Uncertain Date”: “It has been thought unnecessary to include two or three designs, the grossness of which neither the ingenuity of the artist nor the coarse taste of his time can reasonably be held to excuse.” And in this book I have made it a cardinal point to emulate Mr. Dobson’s excellent example. We remember in one of Mr. G. Russell’s amusing books the story of the erstwhile Member of Parliament who had accepted a peerage, notwithstanding his profession of democratic sentiments. Thereupon one of his late supporters, {83} with excellent, though somewhat brutal, metaphor, remarked, “Mr. —— says as how he’s going to the House of Lords to leaven it. I tell you he can’t no more leaven the House of Lords than you can sweeten a cart-load of muck with a pot of marmalade.” _Per contra_, let us always bear in mind, that were the cart full of marmalade, and the pot of muck, the latter would be fully sufficient to render the whole an abomination. Fortunately for us, the Hogarth “Suppressed Plates” which are befitting are of exceptional interest. And it may as well be pointed out here that those peculiarly gross ones which are often alluringly alluded to as “suppressed” are nothing of the sort. So far from being indeed effectively withdrawn from observation, they have had, as a matter of fact, particular attention drawn _to_ them by the fussy ingenuity with which their concealment has been emphasised. The first of the Hogarth plates which we here reproduce—“Enthusiasm Delineated”—is of far greater intrinsic importance than any of those with which we have already dealt in the preceding chapters. It differs essentially from them not {84} only in the fact that here the artist himself is the fount and origin of the suppression but also in the fact that it is a fine example of those palimpsest plates of which more particular description will be found in later chapters of this book. Peculiar interest, too, attaches to the circumstance that, superb as it was in execution, and elaborate to a degree though it was in conception, it was no sooner finished than the artist deliberately decided against its publication, and destroyed the engraving after only two impressions had been taken from the copper. Fortunately for us, one of these is now in the possession of the British Museum. It will be interesting to those who are the happy possessors of _Hogarth Illustrated_ and the _Anecdotes_ to compare this with the reduced _copy_ (a very different matter) made by Mills and published in these volumes. For it must always be remembered that Hogarth’s autograph engravings are infinitely more interesting than the copies, however eminent the journeyman engraver may have been. [Illustration: Enlarged detail of Hogarth’s “Enthusiasm Delineated”]