Chapter III: In which I play the Spy. (With an Illustration.) (1)

THE NATIONAL GALLERY DIFFICULTY SOLVED 346

A WINTER WEDDING-PARTY IN THE WILDS 356

STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND 366

ROUNDABOUT PAPERS.—NO. 2 380
_On Two Children in Black._

LONDON: SMITH, ELDER AND CO.,
65, CORNHILL.

THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

CONTENTS of No. 1.

JANUARY, 1860.

FRAMLEY PARSONAGE. Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
THE CHINESE AND THE “OUTER BARBARIANS.”
LOVEL THE WIDOWER. Chapter 1. (With an Illustration.)
STUDIES IN ANIMAL LIFE. Chapter 1.
FATHER PROUT’S INAUGURATIVE ODE TO THE AUTHOR OF “VANITY FAIR.”
OUR VOLUNTEERS.
A MAN OF LETTERS OF THE LAST GENERATION.
THE SEARCH FOR SIR JOHN FRANKLIN (from the Private Journal of an
Officer of the _Fox_). (With an Illustration and Map.)
THE FIRST MORNING OF 1860.
ROUNDABOUT PAPERS.—No. 1.
_On a Lazy Idle Boy._

CONTENTS of No. 2.

FEBRUARY, 1860.

NIL NISI BONUM.
INVASION PANICS.
TO GOLDENHAIR (FROM HORACE). By THOMAS HOOD.
FRAMLEY PARSONAGE. Chapters 4, 5 and 6.
TITHONUS. By ALFRED TENNYSON.
WILLIAM HOGARTH: PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER. Essays on the Man,
the Work, and the Time.—_I. Little Boy Hogarth._
UNSPOKEN DIALOGUE. By R. MONCKTON MILNES. (With an Illustration.)
STUDIES IN ANIMAL LIFE. Chapter 2.
CURIOUS IF TRUE. (Extract from a Letter from Richard Whittingham, Esq.)
LIFE AMONG THE LIGHTHOUSES.
LOVEL THE WIDOWER. Chapter 2. (With an Illustration.)
AS ESSAY WITHOUT END.

NOTICE TO CORRESPONDENTS.

⁂ _Communications for the Editor should be addressed to the care of Messrs. SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, Cornhill, and not to the Editor’s private residence. The Editor cannot be responsible for the return of rejected contributions._

THE CORNHILL MAGAZINE.

MARCH, 1860.

A Few Words on Junius and Macaulay.

The “secret of Junius” has been kept until, like over-ripe wines, the subject has lost its flavour. Languid indeed is the disposition of mind in which any, except a few veterans who still prefer the old post-road to the modern railway, take up an essay or an article professing to throw new light on that wearisome mystery, or to add some hitherto unknown name to the ghostly crowd of candidates for that antiquated prize. And yet there is a deep interest about the inquiry, after all, to those who, from any special cause, are induced to overcome the feeling of satiety which it at first excites, and plunge into the controversy with the energy of their grandfathers. The real force and virulence of those powerful writings, unrivalled then, and scarcely equalled since, let critics say what they may; the strangeness of the fact that none of the quick-sighted, unscrupulous, revengeful men who surrounded Junius at the time of his writing, who brushed past him in the street, drank with him at dinner, sat opposite him in the office, could ever attain to even a probable conjecture of his identity; the irresistible character of the external evidence which fixes the authorship on Francis, contrasted with those startling internal improbabilities which make the Franciscan theory to this day the least popular, although the learned regard it as all but established—the eccentric, repulsive, “dour” character of Francis himself, and the kind of pertinacious longing which besets us to know the interior of a man who shuts himself up against his fellow-men in fixed disdain and silence:—these are powerful incentives, and produce an attraction, of which we are sometimes ourselves ashamed, towards the occupation of treading over and over again this often beaten ground of literary curiosity.

Never have I felt this more strongly, than when accident led me, a few years ago, into Leigh and Sotheby’s sale-room, when the library of Sir Philip Francis was on view previous to auction. I know not whether any reader will sympathize with me in what I am about to say: but to me there is a solemn and rather oppressive feeling, which attends these exposures of books for sale, where the death is recent, and where the owner and collector was a man of this world, taking an interest in the everyday literature which occupies myself and those around me. There stands his copy of a memoir of some one whom both he and I knew well—he had just had time to read it, as I see by the date, and with interest, as I judge by the pencil marks—in what mysteriously separate relation do he and I now respectively stand towards that common acquaintance? There is his copy of the latest volume of Travels—he had only accompanied the adventurer, I see, as far as the First Cataract—what matters now to him the problem of the Source of the Nile? There is his last unbound number of the _Quarterly_—he had studied it for many a year: at such a page, the paper-cutter rested from its work, the marginal notes ended, the influx of knowledge stopped, the chain of thought was snapped, the mental perceptions darkened. Can it be, that the active mind of our fellow-worker ceased then and there from that continuous exertion of so many years, and became that we wot not of—a living Intelligence, it may be, but removed into another sphere, with which its habitual region of labour—the cycle in which it moved and had its being—had no connection whatever? Must it be (as Charles Lamb so quaintly expresses it) that “knowledge now comes to him, if it comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?”

But I do not wish to dally, here and now, with fancies like these. I only introduced the subject, because Sir Philip Francis’ library was a good deal calculated to suggest this class of thoughts. He was a great marginal note-maker. He criticized all that came under his eye, and especially what related to political events, even to his latest hour. And—singular enough, yet in accordance with much that we know of him, and with all that we must suppose, if Junius he was—he had avoided keeping up, in this way, his connection with the time in which his sinister and anonymous fame was achieved. So far as I remember, his books of the Junian period were little noted. He seemed to have exercised his memory and judgment on the records of Warren Hastings’ trial, the French Revolution, the revolutionary war—not on those of Burke and Chatham.

This, however, is all by the way, and I must crave pardon for the digression. I lost myself, and wandered off, it seems, just when I was reminding the reader that the subsidiary features of the Junian controversy have now become much more interesting than the old question of authorship itself, and that it is an admirable exercise for the intellectual faculties to trace the way in which different lines of reasoning, wholly distinct and yet severally complete, converge towards the “Franciscan” conclusion. It was in this light, especially, that the subject appeared to captivate the mind of that great historical genius whom we have lost: whom we have just seen in the ample enjoyment of most rare faculties, the fulness of fame, and the height of fortune, committed to the soft arms of an euthanasia such as has rarely waited on man. The “Junian controversy” was with Macaulay an endless subject of ingenious talk. It suited certain peculiarities of his mind. As he was the very clearest of writers, so he was also, in a special sense and manner, the most acute of reasoners. In limited, close historical argument—in the power to infer a third proposition from a second, a second from a first—the power to expand a fact, either proved or assumed as a trifling postulate, into a series of facts, with undeniable cogency—I think we must go far to find his equal.

If you gave Cuvier a tarsal bone, he constructed you, with unerring certainty, a humming-bird or an elephant. If you gave Macaulay a casual passage from a letter, he would divine, with strange precision, the circumstances of that letter: the occasion of its writing, the reason of its publication or non-publication, the way in which the writer was connected with some great event of the time, and in which the letter bore on that event. But his judgment of the character of the man, or character of the event, was another matter altogether, and tasked a different order of faculties, with which we are not now concerned. If we were to seek a rival to Macaulay in this peculiar province of clear and cogent reasoning from fact A to fact X, imparting to conjecture the force of truth, we should probably find him rather among lawyers than writers. In truth, the historian always retained, and to his great advantage, many of the mental habits, as well as many of the tastes and joyous recollections of the bar. He was at once the most Paleyan and the most forensic of historical inquirers. When he entered the arena of controversy, you might doubt whether he had donned his armour in the Senate House of Cambridge or the Assize Court of Lancaster. We may assume (as Coke assumed, lamentingly, of Bacon) that had he only stuck to the law he would have made a great lawyer. But it is open to doubt whether, as a judge, he would have done more of service by the marvellous lucidity with which he would have drawn out a series of circumstantial evidence before a jury, or more of harm by his tendency to force the various considerations attending a complicated case into conformity with his own too complete and too vivid ideal of that case.

There is no better way towards appreciating the intensity of this peculiar faculty in Macaulay, than to study the various controversies into which his essays and his history led him: both the few in which he vouchsafed a reply, and the many more in which he rested contented with his first statement—his issues with Dixon, Paget, the High Churchmen, the Scotch, the Quakers, and the like—and to contrast his method with that of his antagonists. They all beat the bush, more or less, and flounder in every variety of historical fallacy. They beg the question, frame “vicious processes” from their premisses, “pole” themselves on self-created dilemmas, commit, in short, every error which logicians denounce in their fantastic terminology—in Macaulay’s reasoning, simply as such, you will never detect a flaw. His conclusion follows his premisses as surely and safely as “the night the day.” You may agree with his antagonist, and not with him; but you will find that what you consider to be his error lies quite in another direction, and consists, not in misusing his own facts, but in ignoring or neglecting true and material facts adduced by his opponents. And beware, O young and ardent Reader, too readily pleased with seeing a hole picked in a great man’s coat, lest the triumphant crow, with which these opponents invariably trumpet their supposed victory, seduce you into premature acquiescence. By-and-by, when cooler and steadier, you may be inclined to conjecture that Macaulay’s piercing instinct was right after all, and that the facts evoked against him are in reality either doubtful or immaterial to the argument.

It was, as I have said, this fondness and aptitude for following up with accuracy converging lines of evidence, which gave Macaulay so great an interest in the Junian controversy, and made him so ready to allude to it incidentally both in writing and conversation. He contributed, himself, two, at least, of the most remarkable collateral proofs which tend to fix the authorship on Francis—the curious error of the English War-office clerk about the rules of Irish pensions, in the correspondence with Sir William Draper—the personal hostility of the Francis family towards the Luttrells, which accounts for the savage treatment by Junius of such obscure offenders. And now, having used the great historian’s name, somewhat unfairly, by way of shoeing-horn, to draw on a fresh chapter on the old controversy, let me place before you another singular instance of this class of collateral proofs, which, I believe, has not been made public before, but which greatly excited the curiosity of Macaulay, and which he would have followed out—if ever he had taken up the question again—with all the force of his inductive mind.

In one of the early letters of Woodfall’s collection, under the signature “Bifrons” (April 23, 1768: vol. ii. p. 175, of Bohn’s Edition), the writer, after accusing the Duke of Grafton of being a ‘casuist,’ proceeds as follows:—

“I am not deeply read in authors of that professed title: but _I remember seeing_ Busenbaum, Suares, Molina, and a score of other Jesuitical books, burnt at Paris, for their sound casuistry, by the hand of the common hangman.”

I shall assume at once that Bifrons was the same writer as Junius. The general reasons for the assumption are familiar to those versed in the controversy. And even were those general grounds of identity less strong than they are, every one would allow that to prove that Francis was Bifrons, would go a long way towards proving him Junius.

A passage so pregnant with suggestion has of course provoked abundant comment: but all of the loosest description. No one seems to have taken the pains to follow out for himself a hint pointing to conclusions of so much importance, both negative and affirmative.

Mr. W. H. Smith, the recent editor of the _Grenville Papers_, thus presses it into the service of his theory, attributing the authorship of Junius to Lord Temple:

“The ceremony here alluded to _probably_ took place in or about the year 1732, when the disputes between the King of France and his parliaments, relative to the Jesuits, had arrived at the highest point of acrimony. Several burnings of obnoxious and prohibited books and writings are described by cotemporary authorities at this time; and as Lord Temple, then Richard Grenville, was in France, and chiefly at Paris, from the autumn of 1731 to the spring of 1733, he had, consequently, many opportunities of witnessing the ceremonies of the burning of ‘scores of Jesuitical books’ by the common hangman, as described by Junius.”—(_Introductory notes relating to the authorship of Junius_, p. cxliv.)

Mr. Smith is scarcely so familiar with the details of French as of English history. No doubt books were publicly burnt in Paris about the time he mentions: but the books were Jansenist, not Jesuit: the letters concerning the Miracles of M. de Paris, the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques, and the like—not the works of the Casuists. In 1732, the Jesuits were the executioners: their turn, as victims, came a generation later.

A writer, who endeavours to establish a claim for Lord Lyttelton, is nearer the mark: but, unluckily, just misses it:——

“We may assume,” says he, “that this burning took place in 1764, as it was in that year that Choiseul suppressed the Jesuits. Thomas Lyttelton was on the continent during the whole of 1764, and for part of the time resided at Paris.”

The burning of books, so accurately described by Bifrons, took place, beyond a doubt, as we shall presently see, on August the 7th, 1761. Now this date raises a curious question, which is indicated, but in a very careless manner, by Mr. Wade (in his notes to Junius, Bohn’s edition):——

“It may be doubted, indeed, whether Bifrons was an Englishman, or _even_ an Irishman: _he certainly could not have been a British subject in 1761, unless he was a prisoner of war: for in that year we were at war with France_. But if a prisoner of war, how unlikely that he could be at Paris to witness an _auto-da-fé_ of heretical works: he would have been confined in the interior of the kingdom, not left at large to indulge his curiosity in the capital.”

Now, assuming (as all these writers do), that Bifrons-Junius actually saw what he says he saw, how does the circumstance bear on the claims of the several candidates?

What was Lyttelton in August, 1761? An Eton boy, enjoying his holidays.

Where was Lord Temple? At Stowe (see the _Grenville Letters_) caballing with Pitt.

Where was Burke? At Battersea, preparing to join Gerard Hamilton in Ireland.

Where were Burke the younger, Lord George Sackville, and the rest of the illustrious persons implicated in some people’s suspicions? Not in Paris, we may safely answer, without pursuing our inquiry farther.

But it is undoubtedly possible that Bifrons-Junius, after all, did not himself see the _auto-da-fé_ in question: he may have heard of it, or read of it, and may have described himself as a witness for effect, by way of a flourish, or even by way of false lure to throw inquirers off the scent.

It would then only remain to inquire, in what way, by what association of ideas, Bifrons-Junius came to give so circumstantial a description, and in so prominent a manner, of an occurrence which had passed in a time of war, almost unmarked by the English public, and which had excited in England but very little attention or interest since?

Now let us see how either supposition bears on the “Franciscan theory.”

Francis was a very young clerk in Mr. Pitt’s department (which answered to the Foreign Office of these days) in 1759. In that year he accompanied Lord Kinnoul on his special mission to Portugal. His lordship returned in November, 1760, with all his staff, and the youthful Francis (in all probability) returned to his desk at the same time.

He was certainly at work in the same office between October, 1761, and August 1768; for he says of himself (_Parl. Debates_, xxii. 97), that he “possessed Lord Egremont’s favour in the Secretary of State’s Office.” That nobleman came into office in October, 1761, and died in August, 1763. In the latter year Francis was removed to the War Office, where he remained until 1772.

Where was he in August, 1761?

According to all reasonable presumption, at work in Pitt’s department.

And yet Lady Francis, in that biographical account of her husband which was published by Lord Campbell—an account evidently incorrect in some details, yet authentic in striking particulars, as might be expected from a lady’s reminiscences of what she heard from an older man—says, “_He was at the Court of France in Louis XV.’s time, when the Jesuits were driven out by Madame de Pompadour_.”

This, it will be at once allowed, is a strange instance of coincidence between Bifrons and the lady. The more striking, because the particulars of disagreement show that the two stories do not come from the same source. But how can we account for either story? How came Francis to be in Paris—if in Paris he were—in time of war?

With a view to solve this question to my own satisfaction, I once consulted the State Paper Office. It happens that during the summer of 1761, Mr. Hans Stanley was in Paris, on a diplomatic mission, to negotiate terms of peace with Choiseul. He failed in that object—some folks thought Mr. Pitt never meant he should succeed—and returned home in _September_ of that year. His correspondence with Pitt, as Secretary of State, is preserved in the office aforesaid. He seems to have had the ordinary staff of assistants from Pitt’s department: but I could not find any record of their names. His despatches are entirely confined to the subject of the negotiation on which he was engaged, _with one exception_. He seems, for some reason or other, to have taken much interest in the affair of the Jesuits. On August 10, he writes at length on the whole of that matter. To his despatch is annexed a careful _précis_, in Downing Street language, of the history of the Jesuits’ quarrel with the parliament: evidently drawn up by one of his subordinates. Enclosed in this _précis_ is the original printed _Arrêt de la Cour du Parlement, du 6 Août_, 1761, condemning _Molina_, _de Justitiâ et Jure_; _Suares_, _Defensio Fidei Catholicæ_; _Busenbaum_, _Theologia Moralis_; and several other books of the same class, to be _lacérés et brûlés en la cour du Palais_. And a MS. note at the foot of the _Arrêt_ states that the books were burnt on the 7th accordingly.

Thus much, therefore, is all but certain; some member of Mr. Stanley’s mission, or other confidential subordinate, was present in the _Cour du Palais_ when that _arrêt_ was executed, and reported it to his principal, who reported it to Mr. Pitt: and Francis was at that time a clerk in Pitt’s office, which was in constant communication with Stanley’s mission. We do not know the names of the individual clerks who were attached to that mission, or passed backwards and forwards between Paris and London in connection with it. But we do know that Francis had been twice employed in a similar way (to accompany General Bligh’s expedition to Cherbourg, and Lord Kinnoul’s mission to Portugal). Evidently, therefore, he was very likely to be thus employed again. He may then assuredly have witnessed with his own bodily eyes what no Englishman, unconnected with that mission, could well have witnessed: may have stood on the steps of the _Palais de Justice_, watched the absurd execution taking place in the courtyard below, and treasured up the details as food for his sarcastic spirit; or (to take the other supposition) he may have read at his desk in the office that curious despatch of Mr. Stanley’s; may have retained it in his tenacious memory; and, writing a few years afterwards, may have thought proper, for the sake of effect, to represent himself as an eye-witness of what he only knew by reading.

All this I once detailed to Macaulay, who, as I have said, was much interested by the argument, and took an eager part in discussing it. But one circumstance (I said) perplexed me, and seemed to interfere with the probabilities of the case. How came Junius, whose excessive fear of detection betrays itself throughout so much of his correspondence, and led him to employ all manner of shifts and devices for the sake of concealment, to give the public, as if in mere bravado, such a key to his identity as this little piece of autobiography affords?

The answer is plain, replied Macaulay on the instant, with one of those electric flashes of rapid perception which seemed in him to pass direct from the brain to the eye. The letter of Bifrons is one of Junius’s earliest productions—its date, half-a-year before the formidable signature of Junius was adopted at all. The first letter so signed is dated in _November, 1768_. In _April_, the writer had neither earned his fame, nor incurred his personal danger. A mere unknown scatterer of abuse, he could have little or no fear of directing inquiry towards himself.

But (he added) I much prefer your first supposition to your second. It is not only the most picturesque, but it is really the most probable. And unless the contrary can be shown, I shall believe in the actual presence of the writer at the burning of the books. Remember, this fact explains what otherwise seems inexplicable, Lady Francis’s imperfect story, that her husband “_was at the court of France when Madame de Pompadour drove out the Jesuits_.” Depend on it, you have caught Junius in the fact. Francis was _there_.

William Hogarth:

PAINTER, ENGRAVER, AND PHILOSOPHER.

_Essays on the Man, the Work, and the Time._

II.—MR. GAMBLE’S APPRENTICE.

How often have I envied those who—were not my envy dead and buried—would now be sixty years old! I mean the persons who were born at the commencement of the present century, and who saw its glories evolved each year with a more astonishing grandeur and brilliance, till they culminated in that universal “transformation scene” of ’15. For the appreciation of things began to dawn on me only in an era of internecine frays and feuds:—theological controversies, reform agitations, corporation squabbles, boroughmongering debates, and the like: a time of sad seditions and unwholesome social misunderstandings; Captain Rock shooting tithe-proctors in Ireland yonder; Captain Swing burning hayricks here; Captains Ignorance and Starvation wandering up and down, smashing machinery, demolishing toll-bars, screeching out “Bread or blood!” at the carriage-windows of the nobility and gentry going to the drawing-room, and otherwise proceeding the wretchedest of ways for the redress of their grievances. Surely, I thought, when I began to think at all, I was born in the worst of times. Could that stern nobleman, whom the mob hated, and hooted, and pelted—could the detested “Nosey,” who was beset by a furious crowd in the Minories, and would have been torn off his horse, perchance slain, but for the timely aid of Chelsea Pensioners and City Marshalmen,—and who was compelled to screen his palace windows with iron shutters from onslaughts of Radical macadamites—could _he_ be that grand Duke Arthur, Conqueror and Captain, who had lived through so much glory, and had been so much adored an idol? Oh, to have been born in 1800! At six, I might just have remembered the mingled exultation and passionate grief of Trafalgar; have seen the lying in state at Greenwich, the great procession, and the trophied car that bore the mighty admiral’s remains to his last home beneath the dome of Paul’s. I might have heard of the crowning of the great usurper of Gaul: of his putting away his Creole wife, and taking an emperor’s daughter; of his congress at Erfurt,—and Talma, his tragedian, playing to a pit full of kings, of his triumphal march to Moscow, and dismal melting away—he and his hosts—therefrom; of his last defeat and spectral appearance among us—a wan, fat, captive man, in a battered cocked hat, on the poop of an English war-ship in Plymouth Sound—just before his transportation to the rock appointed to him to eat his heart upon. I envied the nurse who told upon her fingers the names of the famous victories of the British army under WELLINGTON in Spain; Vimieira, Talavera, Vittoria, Salamanca, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajos, Fuentes d’Onore,—_mille e tre_; in fine—at last, WATERLOO. Why had I not lived in that grand time, when the very history itself was acting? Strong men there were who lived before Agamemnon; but for the accident of a few years, I might have seen, at least, Agamemnon in the flesh. ’Tis true, I knew then only about the rejoicings and fireworks, the bell-ringings, and thanksgiving sermons, the Extraordinary Gazettes, and peerages and ribbons bestowed in reward for those deeds of valour. I do not remember that I was told anything about Walcheren, or about New Orleans; about the trade driven by the cutters of gravestones, or the furnishers of funeral urns, broken columns, and extinguished torches; about the sore taxes, and the swollen national debt. So I envied; and much disdained the piping times of peace descended to me; and wondered if the same soldiers I saw or heard about, with scarcely anything more to do than lounge on Brighton Cliff, hunt up surreptitious whisky-stills, expectorate over bridges, and now and then be lapidated at a contested election, could be the descendants of the heroes who had swarmed into the bloody breach at Badajos, and died, shoulder to shoulder, on the plateau of Mont St. Jean.

Came 1848, with its revolutions, barricades, states of siege, movements of vast armies, great battles and victories, with their multiplied hecatombs of slain even; but they did not belong to us; victors and vanquished were aliens; and I went on envying the people who had heard the Tower guns fire, and joybells ring, who had seen the fireworks, and read the Extraordinary Gazettes during the first fifteen years of the century! Was I never to live in the history of England? Then, as you all remember, came the great millennium or peace year ’51. Did not sages deliberate as to whether it would not be better to exclude warlike weapons from the congress of industry in Hyde Park? By the side of Joseph Paxton with his crystal verge there seemed to stand a more angelic figure, waving wide her myrtle wand, and striking universal peace through sea and land. It was to be, we fondly imagined, as the immortal blind man of Cripplegate sang:—

“No war or battle’s sound
Was heard the world around:
The idle spear and shield were high uphung,
The hookèd chariot stood
Unstain’d with hostile blood,
The trumpet spake not to the armèd throng;
And kings sate still with awful eye,
As if they sorely knew their Sovereign Lord was by.”

O blind man! it was but for an instant. The trodden grass had scarcely begun to grow again where nave and transept had been, when the wicked world was all in a blaze; and then the very minstrels of peace began to sharpen swords and heat shot red-hot about the Holy Places; and then the Guards went to Gallipoli, and farther on to Bulgaria, and farther on to Old Fort; and the news of the Alma, Inkermann, Balaklava, the Redan, the Tchernaya, the Mamelon, the Malakhoff came to us, hot and hot, and we were all living in the history of England. And lo! it was very much like the history of any other day in the year—or in the years that had gone before. The movements of the allied forces were discussed at breakfast, over the sipping of coffee, the munching of muffins, and the chipping of eggs. Newspaper-writers, parliament-men, club-orators took official bungling or military mismanagement as their cue for the smart leader of the morrow, the stinging query to Mr. Secretary at the evening sitting, or the bow-window exordium in the afternoon; and then everything went on pretty much as usual. We had plenty of time and interest to spare for the petty police case, the silly scandal, the sniggering joke of the day. The cut of the coat and the roasting of the mutton, the non-adhesiveness of the postage-stamp, or the misdemeanors of the servant-maid, were matters of as relative importance to us as the great and gloomy news of battle and pestilence from beyond sea. At least I lived in actual history, and my envy was cured for ever.

I have often thought that next to Asclepiades, the comic cynic,[1] Buonaparte Smith was the greatest philosopher that ever existed. B. Smith was by some thought to have been the original of Jeremy Diddler. He was an inveterate borrower of small sums. On a certain Wednesday in 1821, _un sien-ami_ accosted him. Says the friend: “Smith, have you heard that Buonaparte is dead?” To which retorts the philosopher: “Buonaparte be ——!” but I disdain to quote his irreverent expletive—“Buonaparte be somethinged. _Can you lend me ninepence?_” What was the history of Europe or its eventualities to Buonaparte Smith? The immediate possession of three-fourths of a shilling was of far more importance to him than the death of that tremendous exile in his eyrie in the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. Thus, too, I daresay it was with a certain small philosopher, who lived through a very exciting epoch of the history of England: I mean LITTLE BOY HOGARTH. It was his fortune to see the first famous fifteen years of the eighteenth century, when there were victories as immense as Salamanca or Waterloo; when there was a magnificent parallel to Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, existent, in the person of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. I once knew a man who had lived in Paris, and throughout the Reign of Terror, in a second floor of the Rue St. Honoré. “What did you do?” I asked, almost breathlessly, thinking to hear of tumbrils, Carmagnoles, gibbet-lanterns, conventions, _poissarde_-revolts, and the like. “_Eh! parbleu_,” he answered, “_je m’occupais d’ornithologie_.” This philosopher had been quietly birdstuffing while royalty’s head was rolling in the gutter, and Carrier was drowning his hundreds at Nantes. To this young Hogarth of mine, what may Marlborough and his great victories, Anne and her “silver age” of poets, statesmen, and essayists, have been? Would the War of the Succession assist young William in learning his accidence? Would their High Mightinesses of the States-General of the United Provinces supply him with that fourpence he required for purchases of marbles or sweetmeats? What had Marshal Tallard to do with his negotiations with the old woman who kept the apple-stall at the corner of Ship Court? What was the Marquis de Guiscard’s murderous penknife compared with that horn-handled, three-bladed one, which the Hebrew youth in Duke’s Place offered him at the price of twentypence, and which he could not purchase, _faute de quoi_? At most, the rejoicings consequent on the battles of Blenheim or Ramillies, or Oudenarde or Malplaquet, might have saved William from a whipping promised him for the morrow; yet, even under those circumstances, it is painful to reflect that staying out too late to see the fireworks, or singeing his clothes at some blazing fagot, might have brought upon him on that very morrow a castigation more unmerciful than the one from which he had been prospectively spared.

Every biographer of Hogarth that I have consulted—and I take this opportunity to return my warmest thanks to the courteous book distributor at the British Museum who, so soon as he sees me enter the Reading Room, proceeds, knowing my errand, to overwhelm me with folios, and heap up barricades of eighteenth century lore round me—every one of the biographers, Nichols, Steevens, Ireland, Trusler, Phillips, Cunningham, the author of the article “Thornhill,” in the _Biographia Britannica_—the rest are mainly copyists from one another, often handing down blunders and perpetuating errors—every Hogarthian Dryasdust makes a clean leap from the hero’s birth and little schoolboy noviciate to the period of his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith. Refined Mr. Walpole, otherwise very appreciative of Hogarth, flirting over the papers he got from Vertue’s widow, indites some delicate manuscript for the typographers of his private press at Strawberry Hill, and tells us that the artist, whom he condescends to introduce into his _Anecdotes of Painting_, was bound apprentice to a “mean engraver of arms upon plate.” I see nothing mean in the calling which Benvenuto Cellini (they say), and Marc Antonio Raimondi (it is certain), perhaps Albert Durer, too, followed for a time. I have heard of great artists who did not disdain to paint dinner plates, soup tureens, and apothecary’s jars. Not quite unknown to the world is one Rafaelle Sanzio d’Urbino, who designed tapestry for the Flemish weavers, or a certain Flaxman, who was of great service to Mr. Wedgwood, when he began to think that platters and pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole, cleverest and most refined of _dilettanti_—who could, and did say the coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford, there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny’s blood flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You might have made a collection of the great King Louis’s shoes, the heels and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish and Palatinate victories. _Mignon_ of arts and letters, you should have had a _petite maison_ at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your _abbés au petit collet_, teacups of _pâte tendre_, fans of chicken-skin painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, _che non si mostrano alle donne_, you might have been happy. You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn’t quite understand him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word, Horace Walpole, I don’t think you understood anything belonging to England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor her laws. I don’t think that you would have been anywhere more in your element than in France, to make epigrams and orange-flower water, and to have your head cut off in that unsparing harvest of ’93, with many more noble heads of corn as clever and as worthless for any purpose of human beneficence as yours, Horace.

For you see, this poor Old Bailey schoolmaster’s son—this scion of a line of north-country peasants and swineherds, had in him pre-eminently that which scholiast Warton called the “ἩΘΟΣ,” the strong sledgehammer force of Morality, not given to Walpole—not given to you, fribbles of the present as of the past—to understand. He was scarcely aware of the possession of this quality himself, Hogarth; and when Warton talked pompously of the _Ethos_ in his works, the painter went about with a blank, bewildered face, asking his friends what the doctor meant, and half-inclined to be angry lest the learned scholiast should be quizzing him. It is in the probabilities, however, that William had some little Latin. The dominie in Ship Court did manage to drum some of his grammar disputations into him, and to the end of his life William Hogarth preserved a seemly reverence for classical learning. Often has his etching-needle scratched out some old Roman motto or wise saw upon the gleaming copper. A man need not flout and sneer at the classics because he knows them not. He need not declare Parnassus to be a molehill, because he has lost his alpenstock and cannot pay guides to assist him in that tremendous ascent. There is no necessity to gird at Pyrrha, and declare her to be a worthless jade, because she has never braided her golden hair for you. Of Greek I imagine W. H. to have been destitute; unless, with that ingenious special pleading, which has been made use of to prove that Shakspeare was a lawyer, apothecary, Scotchman, conjuror, poacher, scrivener, courtier—what you please—we assume that Hogarth was a Hellenist because he once sent, as a dinner invite to a friend, a card on which he had sketched a knife, fork, and pasty, and these words, “Come and Eta Beta Pi.” No wonder the ἩΘΟΣ puzzled him. He was not deeply learned in anything save human nature, and of this knowledge even he may have been half unconscious, thinking himself to be more historical painter than philosopher. He never was a connoisseur. He was shamefully disrespectful to the darkened daubs which the picture-quacks palmed on the curious of the period as genuine works of the old masters. He painted “Time smoking a picture,” and did not think much of the collection of Sir Luke Schaub. His knowledge of books was defective; although another scholiast (not Warton) proved, in a most learned pamphlet, that he had illustrated, _sans le savoir_, above five hundred passages in Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid. He had read Swift. He had illustrated and evidently understood Hudibras. He was afraid of Pope, and only made a timid, bird-like, solitary dash at him in one of his earliest _charges_; and, curiously, Alexander the Great of Twickenham seemed to be afraid of Hogarth, and shook not the slightest drop of his gall vial over him. What a quarrel it might have been between the acrimonious little scorpion of “Twitnam,” and the sturdy bluebottle of Leicester Fields! Imagine Pope _versus_ Hogarth, pencil against pen; not when the painter was old and feeble, half but not quite doting indeed, as when he warred with Wilkes and Churchill, but in the strength and pride of his swingeing satire. Perhaps William and Alexander respected one another; but I think there must have been some tacit “hit me and I’ll hit you” kind of rivalry between them, as between two cocks of two different schools who meet now and then on the public promenades—meet with a significant half-smile and a clenching of the fist under the cuff of the jacket.

To the end of his life Hogarth could not spell; at least, his was not the orthography expected from educated persons in a polite age. In almost the last plate he engraved, the famous portrait of Churchill as a Bear, the “lies,” with which the knots of Bruin’s club are inscribed, are all “lyes.” This may be passed over, considering how very lax and vague were our orthographical canons not more than a century ago, and how many ministers, divines, poets—nay, princes, and crowned heads, and nabobs—permitted themselves greater liberties than “lye” for “lie” in the Georgian era. At this I have elsewhere hinted, and I think the biographers of Hogarth are somewhat harsh in accusing him of crass ignorance, when he only wrote as My Lord Keeper, or as Lady Betty, or as his grace the Archbishop was wont to write. Hogarth, too, was an author. He published a book—to say nothing of the manuscript notes of his life he left. The whole structure, soul, and strength of the _Analysis of Beauty_ are undoubtedly his; although he very probably profited by the assistance—grammatical as well as critical—of some of the clerical dignitaries who loved the good man. That he did so has been positively asserted; but it is forestalling matters to trot out an old man’s hobby, when our beardless lad is not bound ’prentice yet. I cannot, however, defend him from the charges of writing “militia,” “milicia,” “Prussia,” “Prusia”—why didn’t he hazard “Prooshia” at once?[2]—“knuckles,” “nuckles”—oh, fie!—“Chalcedonians,” “Calcidonians;” “pity,” “pitty;” and “volumes,” “volumns.” It is somewhat strange that Hogarth himself tells us that his first graphic exercise was to “draw the alphabet with great correctness.” I am afraid that he never succeeded in writing it very correctly. He hated the French too sincerely to care to learn _their_ language; and it is not surprising that in the first shop card he engraved for his master there should be in the French translation of Mr. Gamble’s style and titles a trifling pleonasm: “bijouxs,” instead of “bijoux.”

No date of the apprenticeship of Hogarth is anywhere given. We must fix it by internal evidence. He was out of his time in the South Sea Bubble year, 1720. On the 29th of April[3] in the same year, he started in business for himself. The neatness and dexterity of the shop card he executed for his master forbid us to assume that he was aught but the most industrious of apprentices. The freedom of handling, the bold sweep of line, the honest incisive play of the graver manifested in this performance could have been attained by no Thomas Idle; and we must, therefore, in justice grant him his full seven years of ’prentice servitude. Say then that William Hogarth was bound apprentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble,[4] at the Golden Angel, in Cranbourn Street, Leicester Fields, in the winter of the year of our Lord, Seventeen hundred and twelve. He began to engrave arms and cyphers on tankards, salvers, and spoons, at just about the time that it occurred to a sapient legislature to cause certain heraldic hieroglyphics surmounted by the Queen’s crown, and encircled by the words “One halfpenny,” to be engraven on a metal die, the which being the first newspaper stamp ever known to our grateful British nation, was forthwith impressed on every single half-sheet of printed matter issued as a newspaper or a periodical. “Have you seen the new red stamp?” writes his reverence Doctor Swift. Grub Street is forthwith laid desolate. Down go _Observators_, _Examiners_, _Medleys_, _Flying Posts_, and other diurnals, and the undertakers of the _Spectator_ are compelled to raise the price of their entertaining miscellany.

One of the last head Assay Masters at Goldsmith Hall told one of Hogarth’s biographers, when a very—very old man, that he himself had been ’prentice in Cranbourn Street, and that he remembered very well William serving his time to Mr. Gamble. The register of the boy’s indenture should also surely be among the archives of that sumptuous structure behind the Post Office, where the worthy goldsmiths have such a sideboard of massy plate, and give such jovial banquets to ministers and city magnates. And, doubt it not, Ellis Gamble was a freeman, albeit, ultimately, a dweller at the West-end, and dined with his Company when the goldsmiths entertained the ministers and magnates of those days. Yes, gentles; ministers, magnates, kings, czars, and princes were their guests, and King Charles the Second did not disdain to get tipsy with Sir Robert Viner, Lord Mayor and Alderman, at Guildhall. The monarch’s boon companion got so fond of him as to lend him, _dit-on_, enormous sums of money. More than that, he set up a brazen statue of the royal toper in the Stocks flower-market at the meeting of Lombard Street and the Poultry. Although it must be confessed that the effigy had originally been cast for John Sobieski trampling on the Turk. The Polish hero had a Carlovingian periwig given to him, and the prostrate and miscreant Moslem was “improved” into Oliver Cromwell. [Mem.:—A pair of correctional stocks having given their name to the flower-market; on the other hand, may not the market have given _its_ name to the pretty, pale, red flowers, very dear to Cockneys, and called “stocks?”]

How was William’s premium paid when he was bound ’prentice? Be it remembered that silver-plate engraving, albeit Mr. Walpole of Strawberry Hill calls it “mean,” was a great and cunning art and mystery. These engravers claimed to descend in right line from the old ciseleurs and workers in niello of the middle ages. Benvenuto, as I have hinted, graved as well as modelled. Marc Antonio flourished many a cardinal’s hat and tassels on a _bicchiére_ before he began to cut from Rafaelle and Giulio Romano’s pictures. The engraver of arms on plate was the same artist who executed delightful arabesques and damascenings on suits of armour of silver and Milan steel. They had cabalistic secrets, these workers of the precious, these producers of the beautiful. With the smiths, “back-hammering” and “boss-beating” were secrets;—parcel-gilding an especial mystery; the bluish-black composition for niello a recipe only to be imparted to adepts. With the engravers, the “cross-hatch” and the “double cypher,” as I cursorily mentioned at the end of the last chapter, were secrets. A certain kind of cross-hatching went out with Albert Durer, and had since been as undiscoverable as the art of making the _real_ ruby tint in glass. No beggar’s brat, no parish _protégé_, could be apprenticed to this delicate, artistic, and responsible calling. For in graving deep, tiny spirals of gold and silver curl away from the trenchant tool, and there is precious ullage in chasing and burnishing—spirals and ullage worth money in the market. Ask the Jews in Duke’s Place, who sweat the guineas in horsehair bags, and clip the Jacobuses, and rasp the new-milled money with tiny files, if there be not profit to be had from the minutest surplusage of gold and silver.

Goldsmiths and silversmiths were proud folk. They pointed to George Heriot, King James’s friend, and the great things he did. They pointed to the peerage. Did not a Duke of Beaufort, in 1683, marry a daughter of Sir Josiah Child, goldsmith and banker? Was not Earl Tylney, his son, half-brother to Dame Elizabeth Howland, mother of a Duchess of Bedford, one of whose daughters married the Duke of Bridgewater, another, the Earl of Essex? Was not Sir William Ward, goldsmith, father to Humble Ward, created Baron Ward by Charles I.? and from him springs there not the present Lord Dudley and Ward?[5] O you grand people who came over with the Conqueror, where would you be now without your snug city marriages, your comfortable alliances with Cornhill and Chepe? Leigh of Stoneleigh comes from a lord mayor of Queen Bess’s time. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, married an alderman’s daughter two years ere Hogarth was apprenticed. The ancestor to the Lords Clifton was agent to the London Adventurers in Oliver’s time, and acquired his estate in their service. George the Second’s Earl of Rockingham married the daughter of Sir Henry Furnese, the money-lender and stock-jobber. The great Duke of Argyll and Greenwich married a lord mayor’s niece. The Earl of Denbigh’s ancestor married the daughter of Basil Firebrace, the wine merchant. Brewers, money-scriveners, Turkey merchants, Burgomasters of Utrecht’s daughters,—all these married blithely into the _haute pairie_. If I am wrong in my genealogies, ’tis Daniel Defoe who is to blame, not I; for that immortal drudge of literature is my informant. Of course such marriages never take place now. Alliances between the _sacs et parchemins_ are never heard of. Mayfair never meets the Mansion House, nor Botolph Lane Belgravia, save at a Ninth of November banquet. I question if I am not inopportune, and impertinent even, in hinting at the dukes and belted earls who married the rich citizens’ daughters, were it not that by and by ’prentice Hogarth will paint some scenes from a great life drama full of Warton’s ἩΘΟΣ, called _Marriage à la Mode_. Ah! those two perspectives seen through the open windows! In the first, the courtyard of the proud noble’s mansion; in the last, busy, mercantile London Bridge: court and city, city and court, and which the saddest picture!

Dominie Hogarth had but a hard time of it, and must have been pinched in a gruesome manner to make both ends meet. That dictionary of his, painfully compiled, and at last with infinite care and labour completed, brought no grist to the mill in Ship Court. The manuscript was placed in the hands of a bookseller, who did what booksellers often do when one places manuscripts in their hands. He let it drop. “The booksellers,” writes Hogarth himself, “used my father with great cruelty.” In his loving simplicity he tells us that many of the most eminent and learned persons in England, Ireland, and Scotland, wrote encomiastic notices of the erudition and diligence displayed in the work, but all to no purpose. I suppose the bookseller’s final answer was similar to that Hogarth has scribbled in the Manager Rich’s reply to Tom Rakewell, in the prison scene:—“Sir, I have read your play, and it will not _doo_.” A dreadful, heartrending trade was average authorship, even in the “silver age” of Anna Augusta. A lottery, if you will: the prizeholders secretaries of state, ambassadors, hangers-on to dukes and duchesses, gentlemen ushers to baby princesses, commissioners of hackney coaches or plantations; but innumerable possessors of blanks. Walla Billa! they were in evil case. For them the garret in Grub or Monmouth Street, or in Moorfields; for them the Welshwoman dunning for the milkscore; for them the dirty bread flung disdainfully by bookselling wretches like Curll. For them the shrewish landlady, the broker’s man, the catchpole, the dedication addressed to my lord, and which seldom got beyond his lacquey;—hold! let me mind my Hogarth and his silver-plate engraving. Only a little may I touch on literary woes when I come to the picture of the _Distressed Poet_. For the rest, the calamities of authors have been food for the commentaries of the wisest and most eloquent of their more modern brethren, and my bald philosophizings thereupon can well be spared.