Moreover, to explain the growth of this sort of literary hybrid, one is forced to consider the changed conditions under which painting was introduced into England at large. Art, which hitherto had shone forth her enchantment upon the few, was conducted from the first in free England along the broad road of popularity, and given over to a public which had to be educated to art by degrees; and this admission of the mass of the people to the enjoyment of art, in a proportion hitherto unheard of, must inevitably have a retrogressive effect upon painting itself. Instead of the earlier amateur of really distinguished culture, there stood "the People." But just as in the Middle Ages works of art were seen to be a sort of picture-writing for the people--_picturis eruditur populus_, said Gregory the Great,--so now the new patrons could hardly require other than those works of art in which a story was pictorially told. These could be understood even by the man whose understanding was otherwise wholly closed to matters of art; and hence it came about that almost all the _genre_ painters--for very nearly a century--followed with more or less intelligence in the footsteps of Hogarth. To treat him, as is frequently done, because of this popularisation of art, because of this transformation of the picture into the picture story, as a pattern instance of tastelessness, would lead to very dangerous consequences, and should be the less employed because Hogarth's pictures are, at least, comparatively well painted, whereas many of his successors could escape the deluge only in the Noah's Ark of their talent for narration. What Hogarth could do when he put off the schoolmaster, he has shown moreover in his portraits. There he is an entirely great painter. His pictures have none of that Van Dyck elegance, which had become the mode in England before him; they are robust, crude, Anglo-Saxon, strongly and broadly painted withal, sketches, in the best sense of the word. His "Shrimp Girl," in the National Gallery, for instance, is a masterpiece to which the nineteenth century can hardly produce a rival. In the history of painting it is notorious that the latter half of the last century belongs especially to portraiture, and here the English occupy the first rank. Neither Hogarth nor Reynolds nor Gainsborough was a genius like Titian, Velasquez, or even Frans Hals. Their art is not to be compared with that of the greatest of all portrait painters, but they surpassed all the painters of the eighteenth century; they were not only the greatest in England since Van Dyck, but the first portrait painters in Europe at the time. [Illustration: HOGARTH. GIN LANE.]