"So vary'd he, and of his tortuous train
Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve,
To lure her eye."
--MILTON.
[Illustration: ANALYSIS OF BEAUTY, PLATE I.]
If the figures which compose this plate are considered independent
of the volume, they will appear sufficiently incongruous. He has
given us curves and curvatures, straight lines and angles, circles
and squares. He has ransacked the garden for examples, and drawn from
the shops of the blacksmith, founder, and cabinetmaker, illustrations
of his doctrine. To the beauteous and elegant Grecian Venus,[16]
he has opposed the venerable English judge, arrayed in an ample
robe, with his head enveloped in a periwig like the mane of a lion.
The naked majesty of the Apollo Python is contrasted with an English
actor, dressed by a modern tailor and barber, to personate a Roman
general. The elegant winding lines of an Egyptian sphynx are opposed
by a bloated, overcharged, recumbent Silenus. The uniform, coldly
correct figures of Albert Durer's drawing-book, that never deviate
into grace, to the antique _torso_, in which Michael Angelo asserted
he discovered every principle that gave so grand a _gusto_ to his own
works. Three anatomical representations of the muscles which appear
in a human leg when the skin is taken off, are placed close to a
shapeless pedestal in a shoe and stocking, which by disease has, in
the painter's phrase, _lost its drawing_.
A fine wire, properly twisted round the figure of a cone, represented
in Number 26, as giving that elegant wave which adds grace to beauty,
is the leading principle on which he builds his system of serpentine
lines. Of this ancient _grace_, opposed to modern _air_, he could
not have selected better examples than Numbers 6 and 7, where Mr.
Essex, an English dancing-master, places himself in such an attitude
as he thinks the sculptor ought to have given the Antinous, who he is
ludicrously enough handing out to dance a minuet.
Number 19 represents the _deep-mouth'd Quin!_ dressed in all the
dignity of a playhouse wardrobe, to perform the part of Brutus. That
this (and not Coriolanus) is the character meant by the artist, I am
inclined to think, from the statue of Julius Cæsar, with a rope round
his neck, immediately before him.[17] The rope is passed through a
pulley, inserted in one of those triple supporters of great weights,
which some of our provincial carpenters call a gallows, and passes to
upright beams intersected by poles, in the front of a monument, on
which is seated a judge, over whose head is another noosed pulley.
How far this may hint at any connection between the _law_ and the
_rope_ I cannot determine; but a weeping naked boy, who is seated
below, has in his hand what may pass for the model of a gibbet as
well as a square. Over the judge's head is written, BIT DECEM. 1752,
ÆTATIS; the O preceding BIT is covered: I apprehend the same judge
may be found in a print of THE BENCH.
A _new order_ was Hogarth's favourite idea: he has here made an
attempt at a capital composed of hats and periwigs.[18] _An infant
with a man's wig and cap on_, is a miniature representation of Mr.
Quin's Roman general; and a monkey child, led by a travelling tutor,
gives the painter's opinion of those young gentlemen who visited
Rome for improvement in _connoisseurship_.[19] It is copied from a
burlesque of Cav. Ghezzi, etched by Mr. Pond.