The leathern buckets immediately over the Doctor's head were, previous to the introduction of fire-engines, considered as proper furniture for a merchant's hall. Every ornament in his parlour is highly and exactly appropriate to the man. The style of his pictures, his clock, a cobweb over the window, repaired chair, nay, the very form of his hat, are characteristic. A silver cup upon the table, and jug on the floor, show us his style of living. The scantiness of his own table is well contrasted by the plenty exhibited in the picture over the old nurse's head, where iron pots, brass pans, cabbages, and lanterns, are indiscriminately huddled together, with no other meaning than to show how highly a Flemish artist could finish. The attic delicacy of this patient and laborious school is displayed in the adjoining picture; and their humour, in that of a fellow wittily lighting his tobacco-pipe by the red nose of his companion.[25] The pipe and bottle placed under the day-book and ledger, and the whole crowned by a broken punch-bowl, intimate that this venerable gentleman united business with pleasure. The view through an open window marks the situation of our plodding merchant's house to be near London Bridge, and represents that absurd and ill-contrived structure in its original state, loaded with houses. A clock points the hour to be a little after eleven, which at this highly polished and refined period would be deemed an early hour for a citizen's breakfast; at that, it was his hour of dinner!
Thus has our moral dramatist concluded his tragedy, and brought his heroine from dissipation and vice to misery and shame, terminating her existence by suicide!
The drama of Shakspeare has been said to be the mirror of life, which to-day we see lighted up with gaiety, and to-morrow clouded with sorrow. Shakspeare had the power of exciting laughter or grief, not only in one mind, but in one composition. That Hogarth had the same power, and exerted it with the same disdain of the little cavils of little minds, is evinced in this series of prints; from the study of which, a peasant, who has never strayed beyond the precincts of his own cottage, may calculate the consequences of dissipation; and he who has lived secluded from society, may form an estimate of the value of riches and high birth when abused by prodigality or degraded by vice.
In the year 1746 was published a coarse and vulgar poem, in doggerel verse, with the following title: "Marriage à la Mode, an humorous tale in six cantos, in Hudibrastic verse, being an Explanation of the six Prints lately published by the ingenious Mr. Hogarth. London, printed for Weaver Bickerton, in Temple Exchange Passage, Fleet Street. Price One Shilling."
The Clandestine Marriage is professedly formed upon the model of these prints.
THE FOUR STAGES OF CRUELTY.
"The poorest beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great