For
it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations
of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of
vocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the
present, together with the appreciation of them in our literature of the
past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate,
refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes of giants
such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray note, you
catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in past
literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished
impressibility by the great effects in them. Reading, commenting on
Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy sky,
and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might seem to
be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he analyses
it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too knows the
secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.
There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into _The Rake's Progress_, or _Marriage a la Mode_, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless
in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things
picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different age.
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