escapades, for Callot’s gipsy flights, for Shakspeare’s deer-stealing. Young Diogenes the cynic is offensive and reprehensible, but he is no monstrosity. He is going to the deuce, but he may come back again. I will pardon him his tub, his dingy body-linen, his nails bordered sable; but the tub-career should have its term, and Diogenes should go and wash, and if he can afford it, wear fine linen with a purple hem thereunto, as Plato did. It is pleasanter to walk in the groves of Academe, than to skulk about the purlieus of the Mint. Besides, Bohemianism has its pains as well as its pleasures, and Fortune delights in disciplining with a scourge of scorpions those whom she destines to be great men: _Alla gioventù molto si perdona_. Cæsar was snatched from the stews of Rome to conquer the world. But for the middle-aged Bohemian—the old, ragged, uncleanly, shameful Diogenes—there is no hope and no excuse. In that which I daresay you thought a mere digression, I strove my best to guide you through the labyrinthine London, which Hogarth must have threaded time after time before he could sit down, pencil or graver in hand, and say, “This is ‘Tom King’s coffee-house,’ this is a ‘modern midnight conversation,’ this is the ‘progress of a rake,’ and this the ‘career of a courtesan.’ I have seen these things, and I know them to be true.”[2] Nor in the least do I wish to convey that in ranging the streets and beating the town Hogarth had any fixed notions of collecting materials for future melodramas and satires. Eminently to be distrusted are those persons who prowl about the tents of Kedar, and pry into the cave of Adullam, when they should be better employed, pleading their desire to “see life,” and to “pick up character.” They are generally blind as bats to all living, breathing life; and the only character they pick up is a bad one for themselves. I apprehend that Hogarth just took life as it came; only the Light was in him to see and to comprehend. A right moral feeling, an intuitive hatred of all wicked and cruel things, guided and strengthened him. Amid the loose life of a loose age the orgies at Moll King’s and Mother Douglass’s might have been frolics _at the time_ to him, and only frolics. A fight in a night-cellar was to him precisely as the yellow primrose was to Peter Bell: a yellow primrose, and nothing more. He was to be afterwards empowered and commanded to turn his youthful follies to wise ends, and to lash the vices which he had once tolerated by his presence.