An Englishman by birth, character, and disposition, he depicted his fellow-countrymen; he made his sketches in the midst of the hubbub of the street. His world is London, the world-city, "old merry England," which, in contrast with the Puritanism of to-day, still lived through its golden age of riot. In such a world--a world existing to this day, only more decently berouged--moved Hogarth; in the company of wine-bibbers, in gambling hells, in rooms of poets, in cellars of highwaymen, in the death-chambers of fallen maidens. "The Harlot's Progress," which he produced in a series of pictures, brought him his first success. He then published further series of similar careers over crooked courses--"The Rake's Progress," "Marriage à la Mode." He painted the rabble of London, their society and their morals; those who went in cotton and rags and those in satin and silk. In his writings he censures the old painters plainly because in their historical style they had quite passed over the middle classes. And he went with great knowledge to these new subjects. In the National Gallery, which possesses the originals of "Marriage à la Mode," one is astounded at the technical qualities of Hogarth's painting. Whoever has been misled by the engraved reproductions, and looks for bad, distorted drawing, may here learn to know him as a painter in the fullest sense of the word. There is no sign left of the defective caricature which disfigures the engravings; there is a severe, unadorned manifestation of realism, of an art that has from the outset rooted itself in modern life. Under the manners and graces of the age Hogarth stands a "self-made" man, a healthy Anglo-Saxon personality, full of sturdy independence and impeccable common sense. He attracts by a sharpness of observation, a penetration into idiosyncrasies of character, a grip upon the most trivial changes in men's emotions and play of features, the like of which is to be found in hardly one of his predecessors. [Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE II.] Against these qualities it must be understood that an equal number of defects is to be set off. The inartistic part of him was that he followed the æsthetic theories of the age, and looked upon art as merely a means to ends alien to itself. With him painting was an instrument to disseminate the inventions of his poetic-satiric humour; it was a form of speech to him. He is not unjustly called on that account a comedian of the pencil, the Molière of painting. We look at other pictures, but his we read. The commentaries on them are in some respects the rendering back of the pictures into their proper element. Lessing called the drama his pulpit; with Hogarth his art was a pulpit. He wanted, like Hamlet, to "hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." Pictures beneath his hands became moral sermons.