The third and most famous series was completed many years after the "Rake"--in 1745. Hogarth has admittedly taken particular pains with the six oil paintings of "Marriage à la Mode," which have been placed in the National Gallery; and these painted novels reveal in strength and beauty of execution the high-water mark of his work as a painter. The whole is quieter, simpler, less overloaded with ingenious accessories. The impoverished lord has married his son, who is already worn out with excesses, to the strong and healthy daughter of a city alderman. A girl is born; then they go their separate ways. The husband surprises the wife with a lover, and is stabbed by him; the unfaithful wife, moved by this, begs her dying husband for forgiveness. As a young widow, deprived of her woman's honour, she goes back to the _bourgeois_, Philistine ennui of her father's house, and when she learns of her lover's condemnation she escapes from the burden of her misery by means of poison. The father is sufficiently provident to take the wedding ring off her finger before the body is cold, lest it should be stolen from the corpse. In the last sequence Hogarth passed over completely to the moral sermon and the study of crime. The series "Industry and Idleness," in 1747, was comprised in twelve sheets, which he produced only in rough engravings, as he wished exclusively to influence the masses. Two apprentices enter a cloth-weaving business at the same time, of whom one rises, through his zeal for the interests of the business, to a marriage with his master's beautiful daughter, to the rank of alderman, and finally to be Lord Mayor of London. The idle apprentice grows, on the down grade, from a gambler into a vagabond. He is transported, comes back again, and ends on the scaffold. The two comrades meet for the last time when the honest man announces his death-warrant to the knave. [Illustration: HOGARTH. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS, PLATE VIII.] Garrick, as we can see from his epitaph on Hogarth, has not unjustly characterised his art, in these words-- "Farewell, great painter of mankind! Who reached the noblest point of art, Whose pictured morals charm the mind, And through the eye correct the heart." [Illustration: HOGARTH. MARRIAGE À LA MODE, PLATE V.]