its side the corned beef and carrots which country parsons were once glad to eat; who can tell us how the Bastille was stormed, and, a few pages on, what manner of coat and small clothes wore Philip Egalité at his guillotining. When we find such men we christen them Macaulay or Carlyle. The latitude, therefore, I take through incapacity for accuracy, saves me from inflicting on you a long prolegomena; saves me from scoring the basement of this page with foot-notes, or its margins with references; saves me from denouncing the “British Dryasdust,” from whom I have culled the scanty dates and facts, the mile and year stones in William Hogarth’s life. Indeed, he has been very useful to me, this British Dryasdust, and I should have made but a sorry figure without him. He or they--Nichols, Steevens, Trusler, Rouquet, Ireland, Ducarel, Burn--have but little to tell; but that which they know, they declare in a frank, straightforward manner. Among commentators on Hogarth, Ireland is the best; Trusler, the worst. T. Clerk and T. H. Horne also edited (1810) a voluminous edition of Hogarth’s works, accompanied by a sufficiently jejune _Life_. Allan Cunningham, in the _British Painters_, has given a lively, agreeable adaptation of all who have come before him, spiced and brightened by his own clear appreciation of, and love for, art and its professors. Half a day’s reading, however, will tell you all that these writers know. Horace Walpole for criticism on Hogarth is admirable; lucid, elegant, and--a wonder with the dilettante friend of Madame du Deffand--generous. The mere explicatory testimony as to the principal Hogarthian series or engraved dramas by the Sire Rouquet [he was a Swiss] cited above, is valuable; the more so, that he was a friend of the painter, and, it is conjectured, took many of his instructions viva voce from William Hogarth himself. The Germans have not been indifferent to the merits of the great humoristic painter; and a certain Herr Von Fürstenburg has found out some odd things connected with suggestive objects in one of the most famous scenes of the first series--the _Kate Hackabout_, _Mother Needham_, and _Colonel Charteris epopœiœ_--never dreamt of previously in the good people of England’s philosophy. Occasionally, too, in a French _Revue_, you meet with an _Etude_ on _La vie et les ouvrages de Hogarth_, giving us little beyond a fresh opportunity to be convinced that, if there exist on earth a people of whose manners and customs the French know considerably less than about those of the man in the moon, that people are the English.