"The machinery, id est, the celestial and infernal powers, must be brought into your picture on every great or difficult occasion. This will not only give your delineation a classical and learned air, but account for any wonderful action which the world might think your hero could not perform without supernatural assistance.
"Chap. 5.—Treateth of the Episode.
"To vary the pleasure of the spectator, an historical picture should be diversified with an episode; especial care being taken that it have no congruity with the main subject; for the name deriveth from that which is superadded to the original plan, and ought no more to appear a part of it than an insect appeareth as a part of the animal unto which it adhereth.
"Chap. 6.—Describeth the nature and end of the Hyperbola, or Impossible.
"This image is of eminent use in giving a cast of grandeur and greatness to what would, without it, appear trivial and mean. It excites astonishment; and the majority of mankind being most delighted with that which is most marvellous, is a good and sufficient cause for your works being well strewed with wonders."
For the contents of eighteen succeeding chapters, treating of the cumbrous, the inflated, the glittering, the infantine, the pun-ical, the vulgar, and sundry other styles, I have not room, but quitting the bathos of Martinus Scriblerus, must proceed unto that of William Hogarth.
It is well worthy of the title, for a more heterogeneous compound of ludicrous and serious objects was never displayed in one print.
Some of his images the artist has gleaned from the common field of the poor company of punsters, and for others hath soared into the lofty regions of mythological allegory. He ascends from an inch of candle setting fire to a print, to the chariot of the sun, which, with Apollo Pæan and his three fiery coursers, sinks into endless night. Mounts from the cobbler's end, twisted round a wooden last, to the world's end, elegantly exemplified by a bursting globe on an alehouse sign. He has contrasted the worn-out brush with the broken crown; and opposed to the empty purse a commission of bankrupt, which, sanctioned with the great seal of a hero upon a white horse, is issued and awarded against Nature,—by Heaven knows who! He has joined the huge cracked bell of the cathedral to the broken bottle of the tavern; and set in opposition to the mutilated column and capital of Ionia, the rope's end of a man-of-war. The bow which, drawn by the old English archer, gave force fraught with death to the barbed arrow, is unstrung and broken. The mutilated firelock, divested of its tube, shall no more thin the ranks of contending armies. The tottering tower, funeral yew, death's head, cross-bones, and "Hic jacet" of a country churchyard, are opposed by the hard-worn besom, blighted oaks, falling sign-post, and unthatched cottage. In what painters call the sky, we have not only the son of Latona, but Luna in a veil: in the distance a ship is sinking into the bed of the ocean, and a gibbet is erected on the shore; to this, in conformity with the wise institutions of our polished ancestors, and for the luxury of those strong-beaked birds that feast their young with blood,—a lord of the creation is suspended.[236] Once,—
"On our quick'st decrees
The inaudible and noiseless foot of Time