Considered as a whole, this picture has a more historic air than we often find in the works of Hogarth. The royal Egyptian is graceful, and in some degree elevated.[56] The treasurer is marked with austere dignity, and the Jewess and child with nature. The scene is superb, and the distant prospect of pyramids, etc. highly picturesque and appropriate to the country. To exhibit this scene, the artist has placed the groups at such a distance as crowd the corners and leave the centre unoccupied. As the Greeks are said to have received the rudiments of art from Egypt, the line of beauty on the base of a pillar is properly introduced. A crocodile creeping from under the stately chair may be intended to mark the neighbourhood of the Nile, but is a poor and forced conceit.
FOUR PRINTS OF AN ELECTION.
I think it is Voltaire who observes that the English nation are mad every seven years: he might have added that there are local fits which seize some parts of the country at other times; but this madness, like the fermentation of liquors, proves the spirit of the people.
In the following series of prints Mr. Hogarth has delineated the progress of this malady, in four of its most remarkable stages, with that broad and characteristic humour peculiar to himself. He has presented us with the mirror of a contested election, the British Saturnalia; in which is displayed what Abbé Raynal most emphatically calls "the majesty of the people!"—an expression, says the same writer, "which would alone consecrate a language."
The first print was published February 24, 1755, and inscribed to the Right Hon. Henry Fox.—Plate II., February 20, 1757, to Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Ambassador to the Court of Russia.—Plate III., February 20, 1758, to the Hon. Sir Edward Walpole, Knight of the Bath.—Plate IV., January 1, 1759, to the Hon. George Hay, one of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty.
The original pictures are now in the possession of Mrs. Garrick, at Hampton.