"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 If Genius fire thee, reader, stay; If Nature touch thee, drop a tear; If neither move thee, turn away, For Hogarth's honored dust lies here!" Dr. Johnson also composed an epitaph, which Cunningham considers "more to the purpose, but still unworthy:" "The hand of him here torpid lies, That drew the essential forms of grace; Here closed in death the attentive eyes That saw the manners in the face." The tributes--in poetry and prose--are just, examine the works of this great painter-teacher as closely and suspiciously as we may, we can discover nothing that will induce a momentary doubt of his integrity of purpose in all he did; his shafts were aimed at Vice,--in no solitary instance was he ever guilty of arraigning or assailing Virtue. Compare him with the most famous of the Dutch masters, and he rises into glory; coarseness and vulgarity in them had no point out of which could come instruction. If they picture the issues of their own minds, they must have been gross and sensual; they ransacked the muck of life, and the grovelling in character, for themes that one should see only by compulsion. But Hogarth's subjects were never without a lesson, and, inasmuch as he resorted for them to the open volume of humanity, like those of the most immortal of our writers, his works are "not for an age but for all time." [Illustration] NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. [Illustration] The author of _The House of Seven Gables_ is now about forty-five years of age. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and is of a family which for several generations has "followed the sea." Among his ancestors, I believe, was the "bold Hawthorne," who is celebrated in a revolutionary ballad as commander of the "Fair American." He was educated at Bowdoin College in Maine, where he graduated in 1825. Probably he appeared in print before that time, but his earliest volume was an anonymous and never avowed romance which was published in Boston in 1832. It attracted little attention, but among those who read it with a just appreciation of the author's genius was Mr. S. G. Goodrich, who immediately secured the shrouded star for _The Token_, of which he was editor, and through which many of Hawthorne's finest tales and essays were originally given to the public. He published in 1837 the first and in 1842 the second volume of his _Twice-Told Tales_, embracing whatever he wished to preserve from his contributions to the magazines; in 1845 he edited _The Journal of an African Cruiser_; in 1846 published _Mosses from an Old Manse_, a second collection of his magazine papers; in 1850 _The Scarlet Letter_, and in the last month the longest and in some respects the most remarkable of his works, _The House of Seven Gables_.