The pictures on the wall exemplify and satirize the fashion of the time. The largest is a portrait in the French style of one of the earl's ancestors, who traverses the canvas triumphantly. A cannon explodes below him, a comet is seen above; and in his right hand, notwithstanding his cuirass and voluminous Queen-Anne peruke, he brandishes the thunderbolt of Jupiter. _Judith and Holofernes_, _St. Sebastian_, _The Murder of Abel_, _David and Goliath_, _The Martyrdom of St. Laurence_, are some of the rest, all of which, it is perhaps needless to note, belong to those "dismal dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental," against which we have already heard the painter inveigh. Upon the ceiling, with a nice sense of decorative fitness, is _Pharaoh in the Red Sea_. From a sconce at the side, a Gorgon surveys the proceedings with astonishment. Hogarth has used a similar idea in the _Strolling Actresses_, where the same mask seems horrified at the airy freedom of the lightly-clad lady who there enacts the part of Diana.
In the picture of the _Contract_, the young people and "Counsellor Silvertongue," as he has been christened by the artist, are placed in close proximity. These are the real actors in the drama. Building _immemor sepulcri_, the old earl had but few years to live. Henceforth he is seen no more; and the alderman reappears only at the end of the story....
We have only dealt briefly with these concluding pictures, the decorations and accessories of which are to the full as minute and effective as those of the one that precede them. The furniture of the bagnio, with its portrait of Moll Flanders humorously continued by the sturdy legs of a Jewish soldier in the tapestry _Judgment of Solomon_ behind, the half-burned candle flaring in the draught of the open door and window, the reflection of the lantern on the ceiling and the shadow of the tongs on the floor, the horror-stricken look on the mask of the lady and the satanic grin on that of her paramour, all deserve notice. So do the gross Dutch pictures in the alderman's house, the sordid pewter plates and the sumptuous silver goblet, the stained table-cloth, the egg in rice, and the pig's head which the half-starved and ravenous dog is stealing. There is no defect of invention, no superfluity of detail, no purposeless stroke in this "owre true tale." From first to last it progresses steadily to its catastrophe by a forward march of skilfully linked and fully developed incidents. It is like a novel of Fielding on canvas; and it seems inconceivable that, with this magnificent work _en évidence_, the critics of that age should have been contented to re-echo the opinion of Walpole that "as a painter Hogarth had but slender merit," and to cackle the foot-rule criticisms of the Rev. William Gilpin as to his ignorance of composition. But so it was. Not until that exhibition of his works at the British Institution in 1814, was it thoroughly understood how excellent and individual both as a designer and a colourist was this native artist, whom "Picture-dealers, Picture-cleaners, Picture-frame-makers, and other Connoisseurs"--to use his own graphically ironical words--had been allowed to rank below the third-rate copyists of third-rate foreigners.