Note 92 — HOGARTH ILLUSTRATED.

There has been almost as much debate about Hogarth's orthography as about Shakspeare's learning. One of these knotty points Dr. Farmer's admirable pamphlet has put out of the reach of doubt, the other is not of much consequence. I am afraid there are too many damning proofs that Mr. William Hogarth was ignorant of spelling, for his warmest admirers to contest the point any longer. His fame is fixed upon a firmer basis. It was not necessary for him to study the language of the schools; he searched into the grammar of nature, and was himself the founder of an university, in which his pencil, usurping the office of a pen, describes the passions as they affect the countenance, and narrates the incidents that mark our little life with the minuteness of a chronologist and the fidelity of an historian. It has been truly said, that our divine poet saw nature "without the spectacles of books." Our great artist could never have delineated the workings of the human mind with that precise accuracy which marks all his works, if he had studied the language of the passions from the books of your philosophy.