the coffin-lid; gin on the floor; and on the wall there is even an “achievement of arms,” the dead woman’s scutcheon. On every scene in the _Harlot’s Progress_ a lengthy essay might be written. Well, is not every stone in this city full of sermons? Are there no essays to be written on the Kate Hackabouts who are living, and who die around us every day? Better for the nonce to close that dreary coffin, wish that we were that unconscious child who is sitting at the feet of Death, and preparing to spin his pegtop amid the shadows of all this wretchedness and all this vice. FOOTNOTES [1] Richardson, senior, was a pupil of Charles the Second’s Riley. He was born in 1666, was apprenticed to a scrivener, and at twenty turned painter. In 1734, he edited an edition of _Paradise Lost_, with notes. He was not a highly educated man, but had given his son a university training; and, once letting fall the unfortunate expression, that “he looked at classical literature through his son,” remorseless Hogarth drew Richardson, junior, impaled with a telescope, the sire peeping through at a copy of Virgil. But Richardson seems to have been an honest, kindly-hearted man; and William Hogarth, as in every case where he had not a downright rogue to deal with, repented of his severity, cancelled the copies of his squib, and destroyed the plate. Richardson was quite a Don in the Art world. He died in 1745, and two years afterwards his collections were sold. The sale lasted eighteen days. The drawings fetched 2,060_l._; the pictures, 700_l._ Richardson’s son, to all appearances, might have served very well as a sample of those monstrous jackasses that the South Sea Bubbler proposed to import from Spain. He declared himself “a connoisseur, and nothing but a connoisseur,” and babbled and scribbled much balderdash in Italianized English. He was not alone. Pope even proposed to found a science of “picture tasting,” and to call it “connoissance.” In our days the science has been christened “fudge.” I have seen the portrait of Richardson the elder, in whose features some one has said that “the good sense of the nation is characterized;” but if this dictum be true, the most sensible-looking man in England must have been a foolish, fat scullion. [2] “_J’ai vu les mœurs de mon temps, et j’ai publié ces lettres._”—J. J. ROUSSEAU: _La Nouvelle Héloise_.