—— whose filial piety excels,
Whatever Grecian story tells,
is well known. And a sneer of Walpole's may be put to a better use than he ever intended it for, à propos of this subject.—He charitably sneers, in one of his letters, at Spence's “fondling an old mother—in imitation of Pope!”
He speaks of Arbuthnot's having helped him through “that long disease, my life”. But not only was he so feeble as is implied in his use of the “buckram”, but “it now appears”, says Mr. Peter Cunningham, “from his unpublished letters, that, like Lord Hervey, he had recourse to ass's-milk for the preservation of his health.” It is to his lordship's use of that simple beverage that he alludes when he says—
Let Sporus tremble!—A. What, that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white-curd of ass's-milk?
“Mr. Langton informed me that he once related to Johnson (on the authority of Spence), that Pope himself admired these lines so much that when he repeated them his voice faltered. ‘And well it might, sir,’ said Johnson, ‘for they are noble lines.’ ”
J. Boswell, junior.
“I was pleased with the reply of a gentleman, who, being asked which book he esteemed most in his library, answered, ‘Shakespeare’: being asked which he esteemed next best, replied ‘Hogarth’. His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at—his prints we read....
“The quantity of thought which Hogarth crowds into every picture would almost unvulgarize every subject which he might choose....
“I say not that all the ridiculous subjects of Hogarth have necessarily something in them to make us like them; some are indifferent to us, some in their nature repulsive, and only made interesting by the wonderful skill and truth to nature in the painter; but I contend that there is in most of them that sprinkling of the better nature, which, like holy water, chases away and disperses the contagion of the bad. They have this in them, besides, that they bring us acquainted with the every-day human face,—they give us skill to detect those gradations of sense and virtue (which escape the careless or fastidious observer) in the circumstances of the world about us; and prevent that disgust at common life, that taedium quotidianarum formarum, which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms and beauties is in danger of producing. In this, as in many other things, they are analogous to the best novels of Smollett and Fielding.”—Charles Lamb.
“It has been observed that Hogarth's pictures are exceedingly unlike any other representations of the same kind of subjects—that they form a class, and have a character, peculiar to themselves. It may be worth while to consider in what this general distinction consists.