‘In loud recess and brawling conclave sit:’—

the Jew, in the second picture, a very Jew in grain—innumerable fine sketches of heads in the Polling for Votes, of which the nobleman, overlooking the caricaturist, is the best;—and then the irresistible, tumultuous display of broad humour in the Chairing the Member, which is, perhaps, of all Hogarth’s pictures, the most full of laughable incidents and situations. The yellow, rusty-faced thresher, with his swinging flail, breaking the head of one of the chairmen; and his redoubted antagonist, the sailor, with his oak stick, and stumping wooden leg, a supplemental cudgel—the persevering ecstasy of the hobbling blind fiddler, who, in the fray, appears to have been trod upon by the artificial excrescence of the honest tar—Monsieur, the Monkey, with piteous aspect, speculating the impending disaster of the triumphant candidate; and his brother Bruin, appropriating the paunch—the precipitous flight of the pigs, souse over head into the water—the fine lady fainting, with vermilion lips—and the two chimney sweepers, satirical young rogues! We had almost forgot the politician, who is burning a hole through his hat with a candle, in reading a newspaper; and the chickens, in The March to Finchley, wandering in search of their lost dam, who is found in the pocket of the serjeant. Of the pictures in The Rake’s Progress we shall not here say any thing, because we think them, on the whole, inferior to the prints; and because they have already been criticised by a writer, to whom we could add nothing, in a paper which ought to be read by every lover of Hogarth and of English genius.[[11]]

NOTES OF A JOURNEY THROUGH FRANCE AND ITALY

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Notes of a Journey through France and Italy, By W. Hazlitt, was published in 1826, in an 8vo. volume (9 × 5¼ inches). Printed for Hunt and Clarke, Tavistock-Street, Covent-Garden. The printer’s name is given behind the title-page as ‘William Clowes, Northumberland-court,’ and the following lines from Cymbeline (Act III. 4.) appear underneath the author’s name on the title-page:—

‘I’ the world’s volume

Our Britain seems as of it, but not in it;

In a great pool, a swan’s nest. Prithee think

There’s livers out of Britain.’

As stated in the Advertisement, the Notes were reprinted from the Morning Chronicle, to which they had been contributed in 1824 and 1825. They are now reprinted for the first time since the publication of the volume of 1826, and as they appeared in that volume. A few passages which appeared in the papers as they came out in the Morning Chronicle, and were omitted when Hazlitt collected the letters in book-form, will be found among the notes at the end of the volume.