The philosophic prelude to his work was undoubtedly his town wanderings, 1720-30. The great manipulative skill, the grace of drawing visible when taken in comparison with the comic excrescences in the _Hudibras_—the brilliance and harmony of colour he manifested in the _Progresses_ and the _Marriage à la Mode_—have yet to be accounted for. A lad does not step at once from the engraving bench to the easel, and handle the hog’s hair brush with the same skill as he wields the burin and the etching point. The Hogarthian transition from the first to the second of these stages is the more remarkable when it is remembered that, although bred an engraver, and although always quick, dexterous, and vigorous with the sharp needle and the trenchant blade, he could never thoroughly master that clear, harmonious, full-bodied stroke in which the French engravers excelled, in which Hogarth’s own assistants in after life (Ravenet, Scotin, and Grignion) surpassed him, but which was afterwards, to the pride and glory of English chalcography, to be brought to perfection by Woollett and Strange. Yet Hogarth the engraver seemed in 1730 to change with pantomimic rapidity into Hogarth the painter. The matter of his pictures may often be questionable: the manner leaves scarcely anything for exceptional criticism. His colour is deliciously pure and fresh; he never loads, never spatters paint about with his palette knife; never lays tint over tint till a figure has as many vests as the gravedigger in _Hamlet_. Whites, grays, carnations _stand_ in his pictures and defy time; no uncertain glazings have changed his foregrounds into smears and streaks and stains. He was great at Manchester in 1857; great at the British Institution in 1814, when not less than fifty of his works were exhibited, great in body, richness, transparency; he is great, nay prodigious, in the English section of the National Gallery, where gorgeous Sir Joshua, alas! runs and welters and turns into adipocere; and Gainsborough (in his portraits—his landscapes are as rich as ever)—grows pallid and threadbare, and Turner’s suns are grimed, and even Wilkie cracks and tesselates. I think Hogarth came fresh, assured and decided, to his picture-painting work, from a kind of second apprenticeship under Thornhill, and from compassing the “conversations” and “assemblies.” The historico-allegorico-mural decorations were a species of scene-painting; they involved broad and decisive treatment. The hand learnt perforce to strike lines and mark-in muscles at once. The maul-stick could seldom be used, the fluttering wrist, the nerveless grasp were fatal, the eye could not be performing a perpetual goose-step between canvas and model. Look at Salvator, at Loutherbourg, at Stanfield, and Roberts, to show what good a scene-painting noviciate can do in teaching an artist to paint in one handling, _à la brochette_ as it were. Who can relish a Madonna when one fancies half-a-dozen other Madonnas simpering beneath the