Page:The English humourists of the eighteenth century. A series of lectures, delivered in England, Scotland, and the United States of America (IA englishhumourist00thacrich).pdf/236

 fable, we must remember how simple the scholars and schoolmaster both were, and like neither the less because they are so artless and honest. "It was a maxim of Dr. Harrison's," Fielding says in "Amelia," speaking of the benevolent divine and philosopher who represents the good principle in that novel—"that no man can descend below himself, in doing any act which may contribute to protect an innocent person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows." The moralists of that age had no compunction you see; they had not begun to be sceptical about the theory of punishment, and thought that the hanging of a thief was a spectacle for edification. Masters sent their apprentices, fathers took their children, to see Jack Sheppard or Jonathan Wild hanged, and it was as undoubting subscribers to this moral law, that Fielding wrote and Hogarth painted. Except in one instance, where in the mad-house scene in the "Rake's Progress," the girl whom he has ruined is represented as still tending and weeping over him in his insanity, a glimpse of pity for his rogues never seems to enter honest Hogarth's mind. There's not the slightest doubt in the breast of the jolly Draco.

The famous set of pictures called "Marriage à la Mode," and which are exhibited at Marlborough House, in London, contains the most important and highly wrought of the Hogarth comedies. The care and method with which the moral grounds of these pictures are laid is as remarkable as the wit and skill of the