By the announcement, then, that I do not contemplate, here, a complete biography of Hogarth: that I do not know enough to complete a reliable and authentic life: “_nec, si sciam, dicere ausim_:” these papers are to be considered but as “_Mémoires pour servir_;” little photographs and chalk studies of drapery, furniture, accessories of costume and snuff-box, cocked hat and silver buckle detail, all useful enough in their place and way, but quite subordinate and inferior to the grand design and complete picture of the hero. I am aware that high critical authorities have been inveighing lately against the employment of the costumiers and _bric a brac_ shop-keepers and inventory takers’ attributes in biography; and writers are enjoined, under heavy penalties, to be, all of them, Plutarchs, and limn their characters in half a dozen broad vigorous dashes. It can conduce little, it has been argued, towards our knowledge of the Seven Years’ War to be told that Frederick the Great wore a pigtail, and that to his jackboots “Day and Martin with their soot-pots were forbidden to approach;” and it has been asked whether any likelihood exists of our knowing more of the character of Napoleon Bonaparte from the sight of his cocked hat and toothbrush at Madame Tussaud’s. Presuming to run counter to the opinion of the high critical authorities, I would point out that the very best biographies that have ever been written--those of Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys [his diary being eminently biographical], Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Jean Jacques Rousseau [in the _Confessions_, and bating the lies and madnesses with which that poor crazed wanderer disfigures an otherwise limpid narrative]--are full of those little scraps and fragments of minute cross-hatching, chronicles of “seven livres three sols, parisis,” lamentable records of unpaid-for hose, histories of joyous carouses, anecdotes of men and women’s meannesses and generosities, and the like. On the other hand, how cold, pallid, unhuman, is the half-dozen-line character, with all its broad vigorous dashes! Certain Roman emperors might have come out far better fellows from the historian’s alembic if their togas and sandals had been more scrupulously dwelt upon. Is our awful veneration for St. Augustine one whit diminished by the small deer he condescends to hunt in the history of his youth? The heaviest blow and greatest discouragement to the composition of admirable biographies, are in the fact that strength and delicacy, vigour and finish, are seldom combined; and that a Milton with a dash of the macaroni in him is a _rara avis_ indeed. Now and then we find an elephant that can dance on the tight-rope without being either awkward or grotesque; now and then we find a man with a mind like a Nasmyth’s steam hammer, that can roll out huge bars of iron, and anon knock a tin-tack into a deal board with gentle accurate taps. These are the men who can describe a Revolution, and by