Chapter IV: A Black Sheep (3)

It is my wish to tell as succinctly as is feasible the story of seven years in Hogarth’s progress; seven years during which he was slowly, painfully, but always steadily and courageously, climbing that precipitous ladder which we have all in some sort or another striven to climb. At the top sits Fame kicking her heels, carrying her trumpet mincingly, making sometimes a feint to put it to her lips and sound it, more frequently looking down superciliously with eyes half closed, and pretending to be unaware of the panting wretch toiling up the weary rungs beneath. Some swarm up this ladder as boys up a pole, hand over hand, a good grip with the knees, a confident, saucy, upward look. Others stop _in medio_, look round, sigh, or are satisfied, and gravely descend to refresh themselves with bread and cheese for life. Some stagger up, wildly, and tumbling off, are borne, mutilated, to the hospital accident-ward to die. Others there are who indeed obtain the ladder’s summit, but are doomed to crawl perpetually up and down the degrees. These are the unfortunates who carry hods to those master bricklayers who have bounded up the ladder with airy strides, or better still, _have been born at the top of the ladder_. Poor hodmen! they make dictionaries, draw acts of parliament, cram the boy-senator for his maiden speech, form Phidias’ rough clay-sketch into a shapely, polished marble bust, shade with Indian ink Archimedes’ rough draught for the new pump or the tubular bridge, and fill in Sir Joshua’s backgrounds. Some there are who go to sleep at the ladder’s foot, and some, the few, the felicitous, who reach the summit, breathless but triumphant, boldly bidding Fame blow her loudest blast. Forthwith the venal quean makes the clarion to sound, and all the world is amazed. Lowliness, our Shakspeare says, is “young ambition’s ladder:”

“Whereto the climber upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend: so Cæsar may.
Then——”

But so did not William Hogarth. He was self-confident and self-conscious enough,[2] when, after many years of toilsome struggling he turned up the trump-card, and his name was bruited about with loud _fanfares_ to the crowd. He attained the desired end: this Fame, this renown; and to vulgarize the allegory, he managed to snatch that comfortable shoulder of mutton which surmounts the greasy pole, and which, although we feign to covet it not, we _must_ have. But he never attempted to conceal the smallness of his beginnings, to assert that his ancestors came over with the Conqueror, or to deny that his father came up to London by the waggon. He sets down in his own black and white, how he fought the battle for bread, how he engraved plates, and painted portraits and conversations and assemblies, in order to obtain the necessary bite and sup; how, with no money, he has often “gone moping into the city,” but there receiving “ten guineas for a plate,” has come home, jubilant, “put on his sword,” and swaggered, I doubt it not, with the most dashing bucks in the coffee-house or on the Mall. I think they are happy traits in the character of this good fellow and honest man, that he should have had the courage to accomplish ten guineas’ worth of graver’s work, without drawing money on account, and that he should have had a sword at home for the red-letter days and sunshiny hours. You, brave young student and fellow-labourer! draw on your corduroys, shoulder your pick and shovel, be off to the diggings; do your work, get paid; and then come home, put on your sword and be a gentleman. One sees Mr. Beverly or Mr. Telbin slashing away with a large whitewasher’s brush in a scene-painting room, fagging away in canvas jackets and over-alls, covered with parti-coloured splashes. Then, the work done, they wash their hands and come forth spruce and radiant, in peg-tops and kid-gloves. When our Prime Minister is at Broadlands, I hear that he stands up writing at a high desk, not seated like a clerk, working away bravely at the affairs of the _chose publique_, as for a wage of five-and-twenty shillings a week, and afterwards enjoys the relaxation of pruning his trees, or riding over his estate. Keep then your swords at home, and don’t wear them in working hours; but, the labour done, come out into the open and claim your rank.

I daresay that for a long time twenty-five shillings a week would have been a very handsome income to William the engraver. He covered many silver salvers and tankards with heraldic devices, but I don’t think he had any “_argenterie, bagues et bijouxs_,” or other precious stock of his own on sale. Most probable is it, that his old master gave him work to do after he had left his service. I wonder if Mr. Gamble, in after days, when his apprentice had become a great man, would ever hold forth to tavern coteries on the share he had had in guiding the early efforts of that facile hand! I hope and think so; and seem to hear him saying over his tankard: “Yes, sir, I taught the lad. He was bound to me, sir, by his worthy father, who was as full of book learning as the Cockpit is of Hanover rats. He could not draw a stroke when he came to me, sir. He was good at his graving work, but too quick, too quick, and somewhat rough. Never could manage the delicate tintos or the proper reticulations of scroll-foliage. But he was always drawing. He drew the dog. He drew the cat. He drew Dick, his fellow ’prentice, and Molly the maid, and Robin Barelegs the shoeblack at the corner of Cranbourn Street. He drew a pretty configurement of Mistress Gamble, my wife deceased, in her Oudenarde tire, and lapels of Mechlin point, and Sunday sack. But there was ever a leaning towards the caricatura in him, sir. Sure never mortal since Jacques Callot the Frenchman (whose ‘Habits and Beggars’ he was much given to study) ever drew such hideous, leering satyrs. And he had a way too, of making the griffins laugh and the lions dance gambadoes, so to speak, on their hind legs in the escocheons he graved, which would never have passed the College of Arms. Sir, the tankard out: what! drawer, there.”

Thus Ellis Gamble mythically seen and heard. But to the realities. In 1720 or ’21, Hogarth’s father, the poor old dominie, was removed to a land where no grammar disputations are heard, and where one dictionary is as good as another. Hogarth’s sisters had previously kept a “frock shop” in the city; they removed westward after the old man’s death, and probably occupied their brother’s place of business in Little Cranbourn Alley, when, giving up a perhaps momentary essay in the vocation of a working tradesman, he elected to be, instead, a working artist. For Mary and Ann Hogarth he engraved a shop-card, representing the interior of a somewhat spacious warehouse with sellers and customers, and surmounted by the king’s arms. The sisters could not have possessed much capital; and there have not been wanting malevolent spirits—chiefly of the Wilkite way of thinking—to hint that the Misses Hogarths’ “old frock-shop” was indeed but a very old slop-, not to say rag-shop, and that the proper insignia for their warehouse would have been not the royal arms, but a certain image, sable, pendent, clad in a brief white garment: a black doll of the genuine Aunt Sally proportions.

William Hogarth out of his apprenticeship is, I take it, a sturdy, ruddy-complexioned, clear-eyed, rather round-shouldered young fellow, who as yet wears his own hair, but has that sword at home—a silver-hilted or a prince’s metal one—and is not averse to giving his hat a smart cock, ay, and bordering it with a narrow rim of orrice when Fortune smiles on him. Not yet was the ἨΘΟΣ developed in him. It was there, yet latent. But, instead, that quality with which he was also so abundantly gifted, and which combined so well with his sterner faculties—I mean the quality of humorous observation—must have begun to assert itself. “Engraving on copper was at twenty years of age my utmost ambition,” he writes himself. Yes, William, and naturally so. The monsters and chimeras of heraldry and Mr. Gamble’s back-shop had by that time probably thoroughly palled on him. Fortunate if a landscape, or building, or portrait had sometimes to be engraved on a silver snuff-box or a golden fan-mount. The rest was a wilderness of apocryphal natural history, a bewildering phantasmagoria of strange devices from St. Benet’s Hill, expressed in crambo, in jargon, and in heraldic romany: compony, gobony, and chequy; lions erased and tigers couped; bucks trippant and bucks vulnèd; eagles segreiant, and dogs sciant; bezants, plates, torteaux, pomeis, golps, sanguiny-guzes, tawny and saltire.[3] The revulsion was but to be expected—was indeed inevitable, from the disgust caused by the seven years’ transcription of these catalogues of lying wonders, to the contemplation of the real life that surged about Cranbourn Alley, and its infinite variety of humours, comic and tragic. “Engraving on copper” at twenty might be the utmost ambition to a young man mortally sick of silver salvers; but how was it at twenty-one and twenty-two?

“As a child,” writes William, “shows of all kind gave me pleasure.” To a lad of his keen eye and swift perception, all London must have been full of shows. Not only was there Bartlemy, opened by solemn procession and proclamation of Lord Mayor—Bartlemy with its black-puddings, pantomimes, motions of puppets, rope-dancers emulating the achievements of Jacob Hall, sword-swallowing women, fire-eating salamanders, high Dutch conjurors, Alsatian and Savoyard-Dulcamara quacks selling eye-waters, worm-powders, love-philters, specifics against chincough, tympany, tissick, chrisoms, head-mould-shot, horse-shoe-head, and other strange ailments, of which the Registrar-general makes no mention in his Returns, now-a-days;[4] not only did Southwark, Tottenham and Mayfair flourish, but likewise Hornfair by Charlton, in Kent, easy of access by Gravesend tilt-boat, which brought to at Deptford Yard, and Hospital Stairs at Greenwich. There were two patent playhouses, Lincoln’s Inn and Drury Lane; and there were Mr. Powell’s puppets at the old Tennis-court, in James Street, Haymarket—mysterious edifice, it lingers yet! looking older than ever, inexplicable, obsolete, elbowed by casinos, poses plastiques, cafés, and American bowling-alleys, yet refusing to budge an inch before the encroachments of Time, who destroys all things, even tennis-courts. It was “old,” we hear, in 1720; I have been told that tennis is still played there. Gramercy! by whom? Surely at night, when the wicked neighbourhood is snatching a short feverish sleep, the “old tennis-courts” must be haunted by sallow, periwigged phantoms of Charles’s time, cadaverous beaux in laced bands, puffed sleeves, and flapped, plumed hats. Bats of spectral wire strike the cobweb-balls; the moonlight can make them cast no shadows on the old brick-wall. And in the gallery sits the harsh-visaged, cynic king, Portsmouth at his side, his little spaniels mumbling the rosettes in his royal shoes.

In a kind of copartnership with Mr. Powell’s puppets—formerly of the Piazza, Covent Garden, was the famous Faux, the legerdemain, or sleight-of-hand conjuror—the Wiljalba Frikell of his day, and whom Hogarth mentions in one of his earliest pictorial satires. But Faux did that which the Russian magician, to his credit, does not do: he puffed himself perpetually, and was at immense pains to assure the public through the newspapers that he was _not_ robbed returning from the Duchess of Buckingham’s at Chelsea. From Faux’s show at the “Long-room,” Hogarth might have stepped to Heidegger’s—hideous Heidegger’s masquerades at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, where also were held “_ridotti_,” and “_veglioni_”—junketings of an ultra Italian character, and all presented in 1722 by the Middlesex grand jury as intolerable nuisances. Many times, also, did the stern Sir John Gonson (_the Harlot’s Progress_ Gonson), justice of peace, much feared by the Phrynes of the hundreds of Drury, inveigh in his sessions-charges against the sinful _ridotti_ and the disorderly _veglioni_. Other performances took place at the King’s Theatre. There was struggling for its first grasp on the English taste and the English pocket—a grasp which it has never since lost—that anomalous, inconsistent, delightful entertainment, the Italian Opera. Hogarth, as a true-born Briton, hated the harmonious exotic; and from his earliest plates to the grand series of the _Rake’s Progress_, indulges in frequent flings at Handel (in his _Ptolomeo_, and before his immortal Oratorio stage), Farinelli, Cuzzoni, Senesino, Faustina, Barrenstadt, and other “soft simpering whiblins.” Yet the sturdiest hater of this “new taste of the town” could not refrain from admiring and applauding to the echo that which was called the “miraculously dignified exit of Senesino.” This celebrated _sortita_ must have resembled in the almost electrical effect it produced, the elder Kean’s “Villain, be sure thou prove,” &c. in _Othello_; John Kemble’s “Mother of the world—” in _Coriolanus_; Madame Pasta’s “Io,” in _Medea_; and Ristori’s world-known “_Tu_,” in the Italian version of the same dread trilogy. One of the pleasantest accusations brought against the Italian Opera was preferred some years before 1720, in the _Spectator_, when it was pointed out that the principal man or woman singer sang in Italian, while the responses were given, and the choruses chanted by Britons. _Judices_, in these latter days, I have “assisted” at the performance of the _Barber of Seville_ at one of our large theatres, when _Figaro_ warbled in Italian with a strong Spanish accent, when Susanna was a Frenchwoman, Doctor Bartolo an Irishman, and the chorus sang in English, and without any H’s.

More shows remain for Hogarth to take delight in. The quacks, out of Bartlemy time, set up their standings in Moorfields by the madhouse (illustrated by Hogarth in the _Rake’s Progress_), and in Covent Garden Market (W. H. in the plate of _Morning_), by Inigo Jones’s rustic church, which he built for the Earl of Bedford: “Build me a barn,” quoth the earl. “You shall have the bravest barn in England,” returned Inigo, and his lordship had it. There were quacks too, though the loud-voiced beggars interfered with them, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and on Tower Hill, where the sailors and river-side Bohemians were wont to indulge in their favourite diversion of “whipping the snake.” There were grand shows when a commoner was raised to the peerage or promoted in grade therein—a common occurrence in the midst of all the corruption entailed by the Scottish union and Walpole’s wholesale bribery. On these occasions, deputations of the heralds came from their dusty old college in Doctors’ Commons, and in full costume, to congratulate the new peer, the viscount made an earl, or the marquis elevated to a dukedom, and to claim by the way a snug amount of fees from the newly-blown dignitary. Strange figures they must have cut, those old kings-at-arms, heralds, and pursuivants! Everybody remembers the anecdote, since twisted into an allusion to Lord Thurlow’s grotesque appearance, of a servant on such an occasion as I have alluded to, saying to his master, “Please, my lord, there’s a gentleman in a coach at the door would speak with your lordship; and, saving your presence, _I think he’s the knave of spades_.” I burst out in unseemly cachinnation the other day at the opening of Parliament, when I saw Rougecroix trotting along the royal gallery of the peers, with those table-napkins stiff with gold embroidery pendent back and front of him like heraldic advertisements. The astonishing equipment was terminated by the black dress pantaloons and patent-leather boots of ordinary life. _Je crevais de rire_: the Lord Chamberlain walking backwards was nothing to it; yet I daresay Rougecroix looked not a whit more absurd than did Bluemantle and Portcullis in 1720 with red heels and paste buckles to their Cordovan shoon, and curly periwigs flowing from beneath their cocked hats.

Shows, more shows, and William Hogarth walking London streets to take stock of them all, to lay them up in his memory’s ample store-house. He will turn all he has seen to good account some day. There is a show at the museum of the Royal Society, then sitting at Gresham College. The queer, almost silly things, exhibited there! queer and silly, at least to us, with our magnificent museums in Great Russell Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Brompton. I am turning over the Royal Society catalogue as I write: the rarities all set down with a ponderous, simple-minded solemnity. “Dr. Grews” is the conscientious editor. Here shall you find the “sceptre of an Indian king, a dog without a mouth; a Pegue hat and organ; a bird of paradise; a Jewish phylactery; a model of the Temple of Jerusalem; a burning-glass contrived by that excellent philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton” (hats off); “three landskips and a catcoptrick paint given by Bishop Wilkins; a gun which discharges seven times one after the other presently” (was this a revolver?); “a perspective instrument by the ingenious Sir Christopher Wren” (hats off again); “a pair of Iceland gloves, a pot of Macassar poison” (oh! Rowland); “the tail of an Indian cow worshipped on the banks of the river Ganges; a tuft of coralline; the cramp fish which by some humour or vapour benumbs the fisherman’s arms,” and so forth. Hogarth will make use of all these “curios” in the fourth scene of the _Marriage à la Mede_, and presently, for the studio of Sidrophel in his illustrations to _Hudibras_.

And there are shows of a sterner and crueler order. Now a pick-pocket yelling under a pump; now a half-naked wretch coming along Whitehall at the tail of a slow-plodding cart, howling under the hangman’s lash (that functionary has ceased to be called “Gregory,” from the great executioner G. Brandon, and is now, but I have not been able to discover for what reason, “Jack Ketch”).[5] Now it is a libeller or a perjurer in the pillory at Charing in Eastcheap or at the Royal Exchange. According to his political opinions do the mob—the mob are chiefly of the Jacobite persuasion—pelt the sufferer with eggs and ordure, or cheer him, and fill the hat which lies at his foot on the scaffold with halfpence and even silver. And the sheriffs’ men, if duly fee’d, do not object to a mug of purl or mum, or even punch, being held by kind hands to the sufferer’s lips. So, in Hugo’s deathless romance does Esmeralda give Quasimodo on the _carcan_ to drink from her flask. Mercy is as old as the hills, and will never die. Sometimes in front of “England’s Burse,” or in Old Palace Yard, an odd, futile, much-laughed-at ceremony takes place: and after solemn proclamation, the common hangman makes a bonfire of such proscribed books as _Pretenders no Pretence, A sober Reply to Mr. Higgs’s Tri-theistical Doctrine_. Well would it be if the vindictiveness of the government stopped here; but alas! king’s messengers are in hot pursuit of the unhappy authors, trace them to the tripe-shop in Hanging Sword Alley, or the cock-loft in Honey Lane Market, where they lie three in a bed; and the poor scribbling wretches are cast into jail, and delivered over to the tormentors, losing sometimes their unlucky ears. There is the great sport and show every market morning, known as “bull banking,” a sweet succursal to his Majesty’s bear-garden and Hockley in the hole. The game is of the simplest; take your bull in a narrow thoroughfare, say, Cock Hill, by Smithfield; have a crowd of _hommes de bonne volonté_; overturn a couple of hackney coaches at one end of the street, a brewer’s dray at the other: then harry your bull up and down, goad him, pelt him, twist his tail, till he roar and is rabid. This is “bull-banking,” and oh! for the sports of merry England! William Hogarth looks on sternly and wrathfully. He will remember the brutal amusements of the populace when he comes to engrave the _Four Stages of Cruelty_. But I lead him away now to other scenes and shows. There are the wooden horses before Sadler’s Hall; and westward there stands an uncomfortable “wooden horse” for the punishment of soldiers who are picketed thereon for one and two hours. This wooden horse is on St. James’s Mall, over against the gun-house. The torture is one of Dutch William’s legacies to the subjects, and has been retained and improved on by the slothfully cruel Hanoverian kings. Years afterwards (1745-6), when Hogarth shall send his picture of the _March to Finchley_ to St. James’s for the inspection of his sacred Majesty King George the Second, that potentate will fly into a guard-room rage at the truthful humour of the scene, and will express an opinion that the audacious painter who has caricatured his Foot Guards, should properly suffer the punishment of the picket on the “wooden horse” of the Mall.

Further afield. There are literally thousands of shop-signs to be read or stared at. There are prize-fights—predecessors of Fig and Broughton contests—gladiatorial exhibitions, in which decayed Life-guardsmen and Irish captains trade-fallen, hack and hew one another with broadsword and backsword on public platforms. Then the “French prophets,” whom John Wesley knew, are working sham miracles in Soho, emulating—the impostors!—the marvels done at the tomb of the Abbé, Diacre or Chanoine, Paris, and positively holding exhibitions in which fanatics suffer themselves to be trampled, jumped upon, and beaten with clubs, for the greater glory of Molinism;[6] even holding academies, where the youth of both sexes are instructed in the arts of foaming at the mouth, falling into convulsions, discoursing in unknown tongues, revealing stigmata produced by the aid of lunar caustic, and other moon-struck madnesses and cheats. Such is revivalism in 1720. William Hogarth is there, observant. He will not forget the French prophets when he executes almost the last and noblest of his plates—albeit, it is directed against English revivalists, _Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism_. He leaves Soho, and wanders eastward and westward. He reads Madam Godfrey’s six hundred challenges to the female sex in the newspapers; sitting, perhaps, at the “Rose,” without Temple Bar; at the “Diapente,” whither the beaux, feeble as Lord Fanny, who could not “eat beef, or horse, or any of those things,” come to recruit their exhausted digestions with jelly-broth. He may look in at mug-houses, where stum, ’quest ales, Protestant masch-beer, and Derby stingo are sold. He may drop in at Owen Swan’s, at the “Black Swan” Tavern in St. Martin’s Lane, and listen to the hack-writers girding at Mr. Pope, and at the enormous amount of eating and drinking in Harry Higden’s comedies. He may see the virtuosi at Childs’s, and dozens of other auctions (Edward Mellington was the George Robins of the preceding age; the famous Cobb was his successor in auction-room eloquence and pomposity), buying china monsters. He may refect himself with hot furmity at the “Rainbow” or at “Nando’s,” mingle (keeping his surtout well buttoned) with the pickpockets in Paul’s, avoid the Scotch walk on ’Change, watch the garish damsels alight from their coaches at the chocolate-houses, mark the gamesters rushing in, at as early an hour as eleven in the morning, to shake their elbows at the “Young Man’s;” gaze at the barristers as they bargain for wherries at the Temple Stairs to take water for Westminster—a pair of sculls being much cheaper than a hackney coach—meet the half-pay officers at Whitehall, garrulously discussing the King of Spain’s last treaty, as the shoeblacks polish their footgear with oil and soot—Day and Martin are yet in embryo: stand by, on Holborn Hill, about half-past eleven, as Jack Hall, the chimney sweep, winds his sad way in Newgate cart, his coffin before him, and the ordinary with his book and nosegay by his side, towards St. Giles’s Pound, and the ultimate bourne, Tyburn. Jack Hall has a nosegay, too, and wears a white ribbon in his hat to announce his innocence. The fellow has committed a hundred robberies. And Jack Hall is very far gone in burnt brandy. Hogarth marks—does not forget him. Jack Hall—who seems to have been a kind of mediocre Jack Sheppard, although his escape from Newgate was well-nigh as dexterous, and quite as bold as the prison-breaking feat of the arch rascal, Blueskin’s friend—will soon reappear in one of the first of the Hogarthian squibs; and the dismal procession to Tyburn will form the _dénoûment_ to the lamentable career of Tom Idle.

Hogarth must have become _poco a poco_ saturated with such impressions of street life. From 1730 the tide of reproduction sets in without cessation; but I strive to catch and to retain the fleeting image of this dead London, and it baulks and mocks me:—the sham bail, “duffers” and “mounters,” skulking with straws in their shoes about Westminster Hall; the law offices in Chancery Lane and the “devil’s gap” between Great Queen Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the Templars, the moot-men, and those who are keeping their terms in Lincoln’s and Gray’s Inn, dining in their halls at noon, eating off wooden trenchers, drinking from green earthenware jugs, and summoned to commons by horn-blow;—the furious stockjobbers at Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, at the sign of the “Fifteen Shillings,” and in Threadneedle Row; the fine ladies buying perfumery at the “Civet Cat,” in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar—perfumery, now-a-days, is much wanted in that unsavoury _locale_; the Jacobite ballad-singers growling sedition in Seven Dials; the Hanoverian troubadours crooning, on their side, worn-out scandal touching “Italian Molly” (James the Second’s Mary of Modena) and “St. James’s warming-pan” in the most frequented streets; riots and tumults, spy-hunting, foreigner mobbing, of not unfrequent occurrence, all over the town;—gangs of riotous soldiers crowding about Marlborough House, and casting shirts into the great duke’s garden, that his grace may see of what rascally stuff—filthy dowlas instead of good calico—the contractors have made them. Alas! a wheezing, drivelling, almost idiotic dotard is all that remains of the great duke, all that is left of John Churchill. He had just strength enough at the Bath the season before to crawl home in the dark night, in order to avoid the expense of a chair. There are fights in the streets, and skirmishes on the river, where revenue cutters, custom-house jerkers, and the “Tartar pink,” make retributive raids on the fresh-water pirates: light and heavy horsemen, cope-men, scuffle-hunters, lumpers, and game-watermen. There are salt-water as well as fresh-water thieves; and a notable show of the period is the execution of a pirate, and his hanging in chains at Execution dock. All which notwithstanding, it is a consolation to learn that “Captain Hunt, of the _Delight_,” is tried at Justice Hall for piracy, and “honourably acquitted.” I know not why, but I rejoice at the captain’s escape. He seems a bold, dashing spirit; and, when captured, was “drinking orvietan with a horse-officer.” But when I come to reperuse the evidence adduced on the trial, I confess that the weight of testimony bears strongly against Captain Hunt, and that in reality it would seem that he _did_ scuttle the “_Protestant Betsey_,” cause the boatswain and “one Skeggs, a chaplain, transporting himself to the plantations”—at the request of a judge and jury, I wonder?—to walk the plank, and did also carbonado the captain with lighted matches and Burgundy pitch, prior to blowing his (the captain’s) brains out. Hunt goes free, but pirates are cast, and sometimes swing. Hogarth notes, comments on, remembers them. The gibbeted corsairs by the river’s side shall find a place in the third chapter of the history of Thomas Idle.

So wags the world in 1720. Hogarth practising on copper in the intervals of arms and crest engraving, and hearing of Thornhill and Laguerre’s staircase-and-ceiling-painting renown, inwardly longing to be a Painter. Sir George Thorold is lord mayor. Comet Halley is astronomer royal, vice Flamsteed, deceased the preceding year. Clement XI. is dying, and the Jews of Ferrara deny that they have sacrificed a child at Easter, _à la_ Hugh of Lincoln. The great King Louis is dead, and a child reigns in his stead. The Regent and the Abbé Dubois are making history one long scandal in Paris. Bernard Lens is miniature painter to the king, in lieu of Benjamin Acland, dead. Mr. Colley Cibber’s works are printed on royal paper. Sheffield, Duke of Bucks, erects a plain tablet to the memory of John Dryden in Westminster Abbey: his own name in very large letters, Dryden’s in more moderately-sized capitals. Madam Crisp sets a lieutenant to kill a black man, who has stolen her lapdog. Captain Dawson bullies half the world, and half the world bullies Captain Dawson: and bullies or is so bullied still to this day.

In disjointed language, but with a very earnest purpose, I have endeavoured to trace our painter’s Prelude,—the growth of his artistic mind, the ripening of his perceptive faculties under the influence of the life he saw. Now, for the operation of observation, distilled in the retort of his quaint humour. I record the work he did; and first, in 1720, mention “four drawings in Indian ink” of the characters at Button’s coffee-house.[7] In these were sketches of Arbuthnot, Addison, Pope (as it is conjectured), and a certain Count Viviani, identified years afterwards by Horace Walpole, when the drawings came under his notice. They subsequently came into Ireland’s possession. Next Hogarth executed an etching, whose subject was of more national importance. In 1720-21, as all men know, England went mad, and was drawn, jumping for joy, into the Maëlstrom of the South Sea bubble. France had been already desperately insane, in 1719, and Philip, the Regent, with John Law of Lauriston, the Edinburgh silversmith’s son, who had been rake, bully, and soldier, and had stood his trial for killing Beau Wilson in a duel, had between them gotten up a remarkable mammon-saturnalia in the Palais Royal and the Rue Quincampoix. Law lived _en prince_ in the Place Vendôme. They show the window now whence he used to look down upon his dupes. He died, a few years after the bursting of his bubble, a miserable bankrupt adventurer at Venice. And yet there really was something tangible in his schemes, wild as they were. The credit of the Royal Bank averted a national bankruptcy in France, and some substantial advantage might have been derived from the Mississippi trade. At all events, there actually was such a place as Louisiana. In this country, the geographical actualities were very little consulted. The English South Sea scheme was a swindle, _pur et simple_. Almost everybody in the country caught this cholera-morbus of avarice. Pope dabbled in S. S. S. (South Sea Stock): Lady Mary Wortley Montague was accused of cheating Ruremonde, the French wit, out of 500_l._ worth of stock. Ladies laid aside ombre and basset to haunt ’Change Alley. Gay “stood to win” enormous sums—at one time imagined himself, as did Pope also, to be the “lord of thousands,” but characteristically refused to follow a friend’s advice to realize at least sufficient to secure himself a “clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day for life.” He persisted in holding, and lost all. Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was deeply implicated in S. S. S. transactions, as were also many peers and members of parliament. The amiable and accomplished Craggs, the postmaster-general, the friend of all the wits, and for whose tomb Pope wrote so touching an epitaph, tarnished his reputation indelibly by unscrupulous jobbery. He died of the small-pox, just in time to avoid disgrace and ruin; but his poor old father was sold up, and was borne to the grave shortly afterward, broken-hearted. Lord Stanhope ruptured a blood-vessel in replying to a furious speech of the Duke of Wharton (who lived a profligate and died a monk) against S. S., and did not long survive. Samuel Chandler, the eminent Nonconformist divine, was ruined, and had to keep a book-stall for bread. Hudson, known as “Tom of Ten Thousand,” went stark mad, and moved about ’Change just as the “Woman in Black” and the “Woman in White” (the son of the one, and the brother of the other were hanged for forgery), used to haunt the avenues of the Bank of England. The South Sea Company bribed the Government, bribed the two Houses, and bribed the Court ladies, both of fair and of light fame. Erengard Melusina Schuylenberg, Princess von Eberstein, Duchess of Munster (1715), and Duchess of Kendal (1729)—Hogarth engraved the High Dutch hussey’s arms—the Countess of Platen, and her two nieces, and Lady Sunderland, with Craggs and Aislabie, got the major part of the fictitious stock of 574,000_l._ created by the company. The stock rose to thirteen hundred and fifty pounds premium! Beggars on horseback tore through the streets. There were S. S. coaches with _Auri sacra fames_ painted on the panels. Hundreds of companies were projected, and “took the town” immensely. Steele’s (Sir Richard’s) Fishpool Company, for bringing the finny denizens of the deep by sea to London—Puckle’s Defence Gun—the Bottomree, the Coral-fishery, the Wreck-fishing companies, were highly spoken of. Stogden’s remittances created great excitement in the market. There were companies for insurance against bad servants, against thefts and robberies, against fire and shipwreck. There were companies for importing jack-asses from Spain (coals to Newcastle!); for trading in human hair (started by a clergyman); for fattening pigs; for making pantiles, Joppa and Castile soap; for manufacturing lutestring; “for the wheel of a perpetual motion;” and for extracting stearine from sunflower-seed. There were Dutch bubbles, and oil bubbles, and water bubbles—bubbles of timber, and bubbles of glass. There were the “sail cloth,” or “Globe permits”—mere cards with the seal of the “Globe” tavern impressed on them, and “permitting” the fortunate holders to acquire shares at some indefinite period in some misty sailcloth factory. These sold for sixty guineas a piece. There was Jezreel Jones’s trade to Barbary, too, for which the permits could not be sold fast enough. Welsh copper and York Buildings’ shares rose to cent. per cent. premium. Sir John Blunt, the scrivener, rose from a mean estate to prodigious wealth, prospered, and “whale directors ate up all.” There was an S. S. literature—an S. S. anthology.

“Meantime, secure on Garrway’s cliffs,
A savage race, by shipwreck fed,
Lie waiting for the founder’d skiffs,
And strip the bodies of the dead.”

Pshaw! have we not Mr. Ward’s capital picture in the Vernon collection, and hundreds of pamphlets on S. S. in the British Museum? The end came, and was, of course, irrevocable and immortal smash. Ithuriel’s spear, in the shape of a _scire facias_ in the _London Gazette_, pierced this foully iridescent bubble through and through, producing precisely the same effect as the publication of Mr. Sparkman’s inexorable railway statistics in a supplement to _The Times_ newspaper, A.D. 1845. The city woke up one morning and found itself ruined. The Sword-blade company went bankrupt. Knight, the S.S. cashier, fled, but was captured at Tirlemont in Flanders, at the instance of the British resident in Brussels, and thrown into the citadel of Antwerp, from which he presently managed to escape. In an age when almost every one had committed more or less heinous acts of roguery, great sympathy was evinced for rogues. At home, however, there were some thoughts of vengeance. Honest men began, for the first time these many months, to show their heads, and talked of Nemesis and Newgate. Aislabie resigned. The end of the Craggses you have heard. Parliament-men were impeached and expelled the House. Patriots inveighed against the injuries which corrupt ministers may inflict on the sovereigns they serve, and quoted the history of Claudian and Sejanus. The directors—such as had not vanished—were examined by secret committees, and what effects of theirs could be laid hold of were confiscated for the benefit of the thousands of innocent sufferers. I have waded through many hundred pages of the parliamentary reports of the period, and have remarked, with a grim chuckle, the similarities of swindling between this fraud and later ones. Cooked accounts, torn-out leaves, erasures, _and a small green ledger with a brass lock_—these are among the flowers of evidence strewn on the heads of the secret committees. Knight took the key away with him, forgetting the ledger, I presume. The lock was forced, and there came floating out a bubble of fictitious stock. The old story, gentles and simples. “_Comme Charles Dix, comme Charles Dix_,” muttered wretched, wigless, Smithified old Louis Philippe, as he fled in a _fiacre_ from the Tuileries in ’48; and this S.S. swindle of 1720 was only “_Comme Charles Dix_,”—the elder brother of 1825 and 1845 manias, of Milk Companies, Washing Companies, Poyais Loans, Ball’s Pond Railways, Great Diddlesex Junctions, Borough, British, and Eastern Banks, and other thieveries which this age has seen.

Did William Hogarth hold any stock? Did he ever bid for a “Globe permit?” Did he hanker after human hair? Did he cast covetous eyes towards the gigantic jack-asses of Iberia? _Ignoramus_: but we know at least that he made a dash at the bubble with his sharp pencil. In 1721 appeared an etching of _The South Sea, an Allegory_. It was sold at the price of one shilling by Mrs. Chilcot, in Westminster Hall, and B. Caldwell, in Newgate Street. The allegory is laboured, but there is a humorous element diffused throughout the work. The comparatively mechanical nature of the pursuits from which Hogarth was but just emancipated shows itself in the careful drawing of the architecture and the comparative insignificance of the figures. The Enemy of mankind is cutting Fortune into collops before a craving audience of rich and poor speculators. There is a huge “roundabout,” with “who’ll ride?” as a legend, and a throng of people of all degrees revolving on their wooden hobbies. In the foreground a wretch is being broken on the wheel—perhaps a reminiscence of the terrible fate of Count Horn, in Paris. L. H., a ruffian, is scourging a poor fellow who is turning his great toes up in agony. These are to represent Honour and Honesty punished by Interest and Villany. In the background widows and spinsters are crowding up a staircase to a “raffle for husbands,” and in the right-hand corner a Jewish high-priest, a Catholic priest, and a Dissenting minister, are gambling with frenzied avidity. Near them a poor, miserable starveling lies a-dying, and to the left there looms a huge pillar, with this inscription on the base—“This monument was erected in memory of the destruction of the city by South Sea, 1720.” It is to be observed that the figure of the demon hacking at Fortune, and the lame swash buckler, half baboon, half imp, that keeps guard over the flagellated man, are copied, pretty literally, from Callot.

You know that I incline towards coincidences. It is surely a not unremarkable one that Callot, a Hogarthian man in many aspects, but more inclined towards the grotesque-terrible than to the humorous-observant, should have been also in his youth a martyr to heraldry. His father was a grave, dusty old king-at-arms, in the service of the Duke of Lorraine, at Nancy. He believed heraldry, next to alchemy, to be the most glorious science in the world, and would fain have had his son devote himself to tabard and escocheon work; but the boy, after many unavailing efforts to wrestle with these Ephesian wild beasts, with their impossible attitudes and preposterous proportions, fairly ran away and turned gipsy, stroller, beggar, picaroon—all kinds of wild Bohemian things. Had Hogarth been a French boy, he, too, might have run away from Ellis Gamble’s griffins and gargoyles. He must have been a great admirer of Callot, and have studied his works attentively, as one can see, not only from this South Sea plate, but from many of the earlier Hogarthian performances, in which, not quite trusting himself yet to run alone, he has had recourse to the Lorrain’s strong arm. Many other sympathetic traits are to be found in the worthy pair. In both a little too much swagger and proneness to denounce things that might have had some little sincerity in them. The one a thorough foreigner, the other as thorough a foreigner. The herald’s son of Nancy was always “the noble Jacques Callot;” the heraldic engraver’s apprentice of Cranbourn Alley was, I wince to learn, sometimes called “Bill Hogarth.”

One of Hogarth’s earliest employers was a Mr. Bowles, at the “Black Horse in Cornhill,” who is stated to have bought his etched works by weight—at the munificent rate of half-a-crown a pound. This is the same Mr. Bowles who, when Major the engraver was going to France to study, and wished to dispose of some landscapes he had engraved that he might raise something in aid of his travelling expenses, offered him a bright, new, burnished, untouched copper-plate for every engraved one he had by him. This Black Horse Bowles, if the story be true, must have been ancestor to the theatrical manager who asked the author _how much he would give him_ if he produced his five-act tragedy; but I am inclined to think the anecdote a bit of gossip _tant soit peu_ spiteful of the eldest Nicholls. Moreover, the offer is stated to have been made “over a bottle.” ’Twas under the same incentive to liberality that an early patron of the present writer once pressed him to write “a good poem, in the Byron style—you know,” and offered him a guinea for it, down. Copper, fit for engraving purposes, was at least two shillings a pound in Bowles’s time. The half-crown legend, then, may be apocryphal; although we have some odd records of the mode of payment for art and letters in those days, and in the preceding time:—Thornhill painting Greenwich Hall for forty shillings the Flemish ell; Dryden contracting with Left-legged Jacob to write so many thousand lines for so many unclipped pieces of money; and Milton selling the manuscript of _Paradise Lost_ to Samuel Simmons for five pounds.

Mr. Philip Overton at the Golden Buck, over against St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet Street, also published Hogarth’s early plates. He was the purchaser, too, but not yet, of the eighteen illustrations to _Hudibras_. Ere these appeared, W. H. etched the _Taste of the Town_, the _Small Masquerade Ticket_; the _Lottery_—a very confused and obscure allegory, perhaps a sly parody on one of Laguerre or Thornhill’s floundering pictorial parables. Fortune and Wantonness are drawing lucky numbers, Fraud tempts Despair, Sloth hides his head behind a curtain; all very interesting probably at the time, from the number of contemporary portraits the plate may have contained, but almost inexplicable and thoroughly uninteresting to us now. The _Taste of the Town_, which is otherwise the _first_ Burlington Gate satire (not the Pope and Chandos one) created a sensation, and its author paid the first per-centage on notoriety, by seeing his work pirated by the varlets who did for art that which Edmund Curll, bookseller and scoundrel, did for literature.

_Burlington Gate_, No. 1, was published in 1723. Hogarth seems to have admired Lord Burlington’s love for art, though he might have paid him a better compliment than to have placarded the gate of his palace with an orthographical blunder. There is in the engraving “accademy” for academy. The execution is far superior to that of the _South Sea_, and the figures are drawn with much _verve_ and decision. In the centre stand three little figures, said to represent Lord Burlington, Campbell, the architect, and his lordship’s “postilion.” This is evidently a blunder on the part of the first commentator. The figure is in cocked hat, wide cuffs, and buckled shoes, and is no more like a postilion than I to Hercules. Is it the earl’s “poet,” and not his “postilion,” that is meant? To the right (using showman’s language), sentinels in the peaked shakoes of the time, and with oh! such clumsy, big-stocked brown-besses in their hands, guard the entrance to the fane where the pantomime of _Doctor Faustus_ is being performed. From the balcony above Harlequin looks out. _Faustus_ was first brought out at the theatre, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, in ’23. It had so prodigious a run, and came into such vogue, that after much grumbling about the “legitimate” and invocations of “Ben Jonson’s ghost” (Hogarth calls him Ben Johnson), the rival Covent Garden managers were compelled to follow suit, and in ’25 came out with their _Doctor Faustus_—a kind of saraband of infernal persons contrived by Thurmond the dancing-master. He, too, was the deviser of “_Harleykin Sheppard_” (or Shepherd), in which the dauntless thief who escaped from the Middle Stone-room at Newgate in so remarkable a manner received a pantomimic apotheosis. Quick-witted Hogarth satirized this felony-mania in the caricature of Wilks, Booth, and Cibber, conjuring up “Scaramouch Jack Hall.” To return to Burlington Gate. In the centre, Shakspeare and Jonson’s works are being carted away for waste paper. To the left you see a huge projecting sign or show-cloth, containing portraits of his sacred Majesty George the Second in the act of presenting the management of the Italian Opera with one thousand pounds; also of the famous Mordaunt Earl of Peterborough and sometime general of the armies in Spain. He kneels, and in the handsomest manner, to Signora Cuzzoni the singer, saying (in a long apothecary’s label), “Please accept eight thousand pounds!” but the Cuzzoni spurns at him. Beneath is the entrance to the Opera. Infernal persons with very long tails are entering thereto with joyful countenances. The infernal persons are unmistakeable reminiscences of Callot’s demons in the _Tentation de St. Antoine_. There is likewise a placard relating to “Faux’s Long-room,” and his “dexterity of hand.”

In 1724, Hogarth produced another allegory called the _Inhabitants of the Moon_, in which there are some covert and not very complimentary allusions to the “dummy” character of royalty, and a whimsical fancy of inanimate objects, songs, hammers, pieces of money, and the like, being built up into imitation of human beings, all very ingeniously worked out. By this time, Hogarth, too, had begun to work, not only for the ephemeral pictorial squib-vendors of Westminster Hall—those squibs came in with him, culminated in Gillray, and went out with H. B.; or were rather absorbed and amalgamated into the admirable _Punch_ cartoons of Mr. Leech—but also for the regular booksellers. For Aubry de la Mottraye’s _Travels_ (a dull, pretentious book) he executed some engravings, among which I note _A woman of Smyrna in the habit of the country_—the woman’s face very graceful, and the _Dance_, the Pyrrhic dance of the Greek islands, and the oddest fandango that ever was seen. One commentator says that the term “as merry as a grig” came from the fondness of the inhabitants of those isles of eternal summer for dancing, and that it should be properly “as merry as a Greek.” _Quien sabe?_ I know that lately in the Sessions papers I stumbled over the examination of one Levi Solomon, _alias_ Cockleput, who stated that he lived in Sweet Apple Court, and that he “went a-grigging for his living.” I have no _Lexicon Balatronicum_ at hand; but from early researches into the vocabulary of the “High Mung” I have an indistinct impression that “griggers” were agile vagabonds who danced, and went through elementary feats of posture-mastery in taverns.

In ’24, Hogarth illustrated a translation of the _Golden Ass of Apuleius_. The plates are coarse and clumsy; show no humour; were mere pot-boilers, _gagne-pains_, thrusts with the burin at the wolf looking in at the Hogarthian door, I imagine. Then came five frontispieces for a translation of _Cassandra_. These I have not seen. Then fifteen head-pieces for Beaver’s _Military Punishments of the Ancients_, narrow little slips full of figures in chiaroscuro, many drawn from Callot’s curious martyrology, _Les Saincts et Sainctes de l’Année_, about three hundred graphic illustrations of human torture! There was also a frontispiece to the _Happy Ascetic_, and one to the Oxford squib of _Terræ Filius_, in 1724, but of the joyous recluse in question I have no cognizance.

In 1722 (you see I am wandering up and down the years as well as the streets), London saw a show—and Hogarth doubtless was there to see—which merits some lines of mention. The drivelling, avaricious dotard, who, crossing a room and looking at himself in a mirror, sighed and mumbled, “That was once a man:”—this poor wreck of mortality died, and became in an instant, and once more, John the great Duke of Marlborough. On the 9th of August, 1722, he was buried with extraordinary pomp in Westminster Abbey. The saloons of Marlborough House, where the corpse lay in state, were hung with fine black cloth, and garnished with bays and cypress. In the death-chamber was a chair of state surmounted by a “majesty scutcheon.” The coffin was on a bed of state, covered with a “fine holland sheet,” over that a complete suit of armour, gilt, _but empty_. Twenty years before, there would have been a waxen image in the dead man’s likeness within the armour, but this hideous fantasy of Tussaud-tombstone effigies had in 1722 fallen into desuetude.[8] The garter was buckled round the steel leg of this suit of war-harness; one listless gauntlet held a general’s truncheon; above the vacuous helmet with its unstirred plumes was the cap of a Prince of the Empire. The procession, lengthy and splendid, passed from Marlborough House through St. James’s Park to Hyde Park Corner, then through Piccadilly, down St. James’s Street, along Pall Mall, and by King Street, Westminster, to the Abbey. Fifteen pieces of cannon rambled in this show. Chelsea pensioners, to the number of the years of the age of the deceased, preceded the car. The colours were wreathed in crape and cypress. Guidon was there, and the great standard, and many bannerols and achievements of arms. “The mourning horse with trophies and plumades” was gorgeous. There was a horse of state and a mourning horse, sadly led by the dead duke’s equerries. And pray note: the minutest details of the procession were copied from the programme of the Duke of Albemarle’s funeral (Monk); which, again, was a copy of Oliver Cromwell’s—which, again, was a reproduction, on a more splendid scale, of the obsequies of Sir Philip Sidney, killed at Zutphen. Who among us saw not the great scarlet and black show of 1852, the funeral of the Duke of Wellington? Don’t you remember the eighty-four tottering old Pensioners, corresponding in number with the years of our heroic brother departed? When gentle Philip Sidney was borne to the tomb, _thirty-one_ poor men followed the hearse. The brave soldier, the gallant gentleman, the ripe scholar, the accomplished writer was so young. Arthur and Philip! And so century shakes hand with century, and the new is ever old, and the last novelty is the earliest fashion, and old Egypt leers from a glass-case, or a four thousand year old fresco, and whispers to Sir Plume, “I, too, wore a curled periwig, and used tweezers to remove superfluous hairs.”