out at the joke with a most surprising obliquity of vision, and immediately ‘your lungs begin to crow like chanticleer.’ Again, there is the little boy crying in The Cut Finger, who only gives you the idea of a cross, disagreeable, obstinate child in pain: whereas the same face in Hogarth’s Noon, from the ridiculous perplexity it is in, and its extravagant, noisy, unfelt distress at the accident of having let fall the pye-dish, is quite irresistible. Mr. Wilkie in his picture of the Ale-house door, we believe, painted Mr. Liston as one of the figures, without any great effect. Hogarth would have given any price for such a subject, and would have made it worth any money. We have never seen any thing, in the expression of comic humour, equal to Hogarth’s pictures, but Liston’s face! We have already remarked that we did not think Hogarth a fit person to paint a romantic scene in Wales. In fact, we know no one who had a less pastoral imagination. Mr. Wilkie paints interiors: but still you always connect them with the country. Hogarth, even when he paints people in the open air, represents them either as coming from London, as in the polling for votes at Brentford, or as returning to it, as the dyer and his wife at Bagnigge Wells. In this last picture he has contrived to convert a common rural image into a type and emblem of city cuckoldom. He delights in the thick of St. Giles’s or St. James’s. His pictures breathe a certain close greasy tavern air. The fare he serves up to us consists of high-seasoned dishes, ragouts and olla podridas, like the supper in Gil Blas, which it requires a strong stomach to digest. Mr. Wilkie presents us with a sort of lenten fare, very good and wholesome, but rather insipid than overpowering.[27]