No. VII. The Curate and Barber disguising themselves to convey Don Quixote home. An excellent representation of the curate assuming the dress of a distressed virgin who, by his tale of having been wronged by a naughty knight, hopes to induce the Don to return to his home.
Whilst on the subject of Don Quixote it may be mentioned that, much earlier in his career, Hogarth had designed and engraved a plate dealing with “Sancho’s feast,” but this must not be in any way identified or confused with the series begun for Lord Carteret, although Ireland groups them all together.
Don Quixote No. V.—Don Quixote releases the Galley Slaves
Don Quixote No. VI.—The First Interview
So much for Hogarth’s suppressed illustrations, and it is, it must be confessed, something of a relief to turn again from his cognate art to that which is individual and typical. For we do not much value Hogarth as an illustrator. In this character he rarely does more than repeat for us {124} in another medium the obvious matters already dealt with in the letterpress. “Illustration,” as Mr. Laurence Housman has well said, “should be something in the nature of a brilliant commentary throwing out new light upon the subject, an exquisite parenthesis of things better said in this medium than could be said in any other: in a word, the result of another creative faculty at work on the same theme.” And this in no way describes Hogarth’s work as an illustrator. It is as a great original painter working out consummately the homeliest of morals that he appeals to us. Those morals which, to quote Thackeray, are “as easy as Goody Twoshoes,” the moral of “Tommy was a naughty boy and the master flogged him, and Jacky was a good boy and had plum-cake.” For it is in “Marriage à la Mode,” “A Rake’s Progress,” “Industry and Idleness,” that he succeeds inimitably, carrying out the motto beneath “Time Smoking a Picture”:—
“To Nature and your Self appeal Nor learn of others what to feel.”
Don Quixote No. VII.—The Curate and the Barber