[Itopengame-main] Ink we may retire for the night; for we have but three hours until the mar

[Earley <pun...@vi...>]

Ollow it in its more contaminated descent, to those representations of
local manners and national modifications of society, whose
characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance, for instance, we
admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passions of the day,
every hour contributes something to obliterate, which soon become
unintelligible by time, or degenerate into caricature, the chronicle of
scandal, the history-book of the vulgar." It seems, strangely enough, to
have been the fashion among the, in comparison with Hogarth, puny
academicians of that day, to underrate that great painter, that moral
painter. We really should pity the infatuated prejudice of the man, who
could see in the deep tragedy, the moral tragedy, "Marriage a la Mode,"
any _humorous_ exuberance; or not understand that the passions set
forth, and for a moral end, are not "the fleeting passions of the day,"
but as permanent as human nature--who could see, in such series of
pictures, any "caricature," or that their object is to "chronicle
scandal." That it is the "history of the vulgar," we dispute not. For it
is drama of the vulgar as of the unvulgar--a deep tragedy of human
nature; alas! time has not made "_unintelligible_" these _not_ "fleeting
passions of the day." As long as man is man, will Hogarth be true to
nature; and nothing in art is more strange, than that such op