The New Monthly Magazine (Volume 102) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: promises " pour diner: cocks'-combs, ducks'-tongues, rabbits'-ears, fricassee of snails, grand daevf buerr,"?a satire upon the fashionable taste for French and eccentric cookery. The lady of the house, grotesquely dressed in stiff brocade, is showing to her visitor, a gentleman with a large muff, long queue, and feathered hat, one of those specimens which it was then a fashionable taste to collect?a small cup and saucer of okl china, which she appears to consider a perfect gem. The attitude of the gentleman, even, is a study from contemporary manners. Miss Hawkins, in describing the personal appearance of Horace Valpole, tells us that the mincing air was indispensable to the character of the fine gentleman: " He always entered a room in that style of affected delicacy which fashion had made almost natural?cha- peau bras between his hands, as if he wished to compress it, or under hia ami, knees bent, and feet on tiptoe, as if afraid of a wet floor." There is scarcely a single work of Hogarth's which does not afford us a glimpse of fashionable follies. The unobtrusive but ingenious manner in which he makes even the most trivial accessories of his pictures tell his moral, or slily point his satire, will frequently be serviceable to us in investigating the manners and customs of which we are collecting specimens; and if we may occasionally be thought too severe upon the century in bringing forward what was ludicrous or vicious iu its composition, we more than atone for it in merely repeating the names of those who help us, by the vivid efforts of their pens and pencils which they have left behind them, to illustrate its peculiarities; for who can feel disrespect for the period, when he is thus casually reminded that such men as Hogarth, and the satirists and authors whom we ...