The first impression caused in me by reading this passage, was an eager desire to know who this Mr. Penny was. This great surpasser of Hogarth in the "delicacy of his relish," and the "line which he pursued," where is he, what are his works, what has he to shew? In vain I tried to recollect, till by happily putting the question to a friend who is more conversant in the works of the illustrious obscure than myself, I learned that he was the painter of a _Death of Wolfe_ which missed the prize the year that the celebrated picture of West on the same subject obtained it; that he also made a picture of the _Marquis of Granby relieving a Sick Soldier_; moreover, that he was the inventor of two pictures of _Suspended and Restored Animation_, which I now remember to have seen in the Exhibition some years since, and the prints from which are still extant in good men's houses. This then I suppose is the line of subjects in which Mr. Penny was so much superior to Hogarth. I confess I am not of that opinion. The relieving of poverty by the purse, and the restoring a young man to his parents by using the methods prescribed by the Humane Society, are doubtless very amiable subjects, pretty things to teach the first rudiments of humanity; they amount to about as much instruction as the stories of good boys that give away their custards to poor beggar-boys in children's books. But, good God! is this _milk for babes_ to be set up in opposition to Hogarth's moral scenes, his _strong meat for men_? As well might we prefer the fulsome verses upon their own goodness, to which the gentlemen of the Literary Fund annually sit still with such shameless patience to listen, to the satires of Juvenal and Persius; because the former are full of tender images of Worth relieved by Charity, and Charity stretching out her hand to rescue sinking Genius, and the theme of the latter is men's crimes and follies with their black consequences--forgetful meanwhile of those strains of moral pathos, those sublime heart-touches, which these poets (in _them_ chiefly shewing themselves poets) are perpetually darting across the otherwise appalling gloom of their subject--consolatory remembrancers, when their pictures of guilty mankind have made us even to despair for our species, that there is such a thing as virtue and moral dignity in the world, that her unquenchable spark is not utterly out--refreshing admonitions, to which we turn for shelter from the too great heat and asperity of the general satire.