the "travelling English" who flocked foundation in truth. The print was over there. His visit was not of long inscribed to George II.; but when the duration, for having dared to take a proof was laid before his Majesty, he sketch of the gates of Calais, he was ar- did not quite understand the joke. rested as a spy, and conveyed back to "Does the fellow," said he, 66 mean to England. The artist tried to avenge laugh at my guards? Take his trumhimself for this affront, by a print which pery out of my sight." The picture he termed "The Roast Beef of Old was removed, and the dedicatory inEngland." The print comes, one can scription erased; and Hogarth dediwell see, from the hands of an angry cated his print to the king of Prussia, man. It is very absurd and ridiculous, from whom he received a handsome no doubt, to be ragged and ill fed, but acknowledgment. The original paintas few people would submit to such ing was disposed of by the kind of lotunpleasant fortune if they could help it,lery which at present is known by the the satire upon these weaknesses falls name of the " Art-Union;" every purto the ground. We have now, happily, chaser of a print receiving a ticket. outlived the times when our most bitter Some chances which remained were taunt against a Frenchman was the presented to the Foundling Hospital, meagreness of his diet. Upon this and one of these latter tickets carried vulgar prejudice, Hogarth's print hinges; away the prize. This plan was more it is not worth description. In the beneficial to the painter than his sales: year 1751, he presented to the Found-" a lottery," he observed, "is the only ling Hospital a picture of "The Find-chance a living painter has of being ing of Moses," which is perhaps the paid for his time." "Beer Street," and best of his serious works. This paint- "Gin Lane," two works, one of which ing, with others presented by other ar- has, no doubt, great admirers amongst tists to the same Institution, used to be the temperance societies, next appeared. exhibited for the benefit of the Found-Their logic is weaker than their execulings, a proceeding which gave rise to tion. The imbibers of beer are very the present Royal Acadamy. Hogarth joyous, pleasant people; the gin drinkwas the earliest and amongst the largest ers are no doubt copied from nature, of these who, by their paintings, thus and amongst them, the only being who contributed to so deserving and meri- thrives is the pawnbroker. Two natorious a charity. The next works of tional prints, called "France" and "Engour artist were, "The Four Stages of land" followed; and ridiculed the fear Cruelty," which are revolting in the which was then as now, (and probably extreme; and a ludicrous picture of the ever since the Dauphin landed at Do"March of the Guards to Finchley." ver, in King John's reign,) very prevaPrince Charles Edward, the darling of lent, namely, of the French invasion. Scottish minstrelsy, and the hope of a Both pictures belong properly to hisgreat portion of the then British nation, toric caricature, and both are in their had began a successful campaign by way overloaded. The French soldier one or two bold strokes, and was ad- in the first print, who has spitted five vancing upon London. The guards of frogs upon his sword, and is roasting the Hanoverian prince, who occupied them at a bivouac fire, was a popular the throne, are advancing to meet him; element in national ridicule, which and the drunken and reeling rout of would now be scouted at Astley's, or the soldiers do not badly represent the lower theatres, whereat highly coloured terror which spread over all parts of the nautical dramas are popular. Some community. In the gossiping pages of scenes called "The Cockpit," followed Horace Walpole, we shall find the true this pair of prints, and are broad safeeling of the country concerning this tires upon that cruel sport. The satire advance of the Chevalier, and in the fell harmlessly. Lords and gentlemen, papers of Fielding's Covent Garden as well as blacklegs and butchers, conJournal, we find the fear and alarm tinued to indulge for years after, in the visibly depicted. Hogarth has probably noble sport of "cocking." The next highly caricatured the scene he beheld, series was The Election," in four but the drunken panic and disorder, the plates. The bribery and corruption of hurried march, the carousing and swag-such a scene had, perhaps, never been gering, and thorough carelessness of placed so prominently before the eyes of discipline, had, without doubt, some the world. To the polling, the lame, a very blind, dead, and deaf, are carried up to treatment, and the prints and illustrarecord a vote for one or the other mem tions which accompanied it, were not ber. A doctor by the side of a sick left untouched. Hogarth, who seems man, has him borne along to vote for a to have had like most great men in his favourite client. This incident is a art, a considerable share of vanity, was fact, and is related of Dr. Barrowby. not undisturbed by these attacks; he The patient expired at the hustings. had endeavoured--the work of a giant— The fourth scene is the" Chairing of to fix the principles of taste, and he the Member," who resembles in his failed, yet his book has its merits, and person the celebrated Bubb Doddington, it has been highly commended by a raised to the peerage by the title of president of the Royal Academy, Sir Lord Melcombe Regis. He is seated in Benjamin West, whose judgment was a chair, raised aloft by four brawny con- vastly superior to his powers as a stituents. The pictures are full of ex- painter. pression and life, and are finely painted, In 1759, Hogarth, about to discontinue merely to speak of their mechanical painting, determined to enter into comexecution. Foes mingle, however, in petition with a painting said to be by his cortège, but a blow from a flail Correggio. His wife, who was prostrates one of his bearers, and is handsome woman, supplied the model, about to overthrow the member. The and the artist produced his " Sigispictures are now in the museum of Sir munda." The picture was painted for John Soane, which he bequeathed to the Sir Robert Grosvenor, but the gentlenation; whilst looking on them, and man refused the picture, when it was remembering recent scenes of bribery completed, and it remained on Hogarth's and riot in our own days, the reader hands. The answer of Sir Robert was, will sigh to think how little we have besides this, unmanly and insulting, for politically improved, since the days age was growing upon Hogarth, and a when Hogarth published the election refusal should not be coupled with insoscenes of the honourable and immacu-lence; he refused the picture because, late member for Guzzledown. David he writes, "the performance is so strikGarrick bought these excellent pictures ing and inimitable, that constantly for £200. having it before one's eyes, would be too The time now came when Hogarth often occasioning melancholy ideas to was to come forward as an author; that arise in one's mind, which a curtain's is to say, for it has been denied that the being drawn before it would not dimibook was written by him, he published nish in the least." The artist gave no a book called the "Analysis of Beauty," answer to the insult, and the picture, a work containing many new notions as we have said, remained on his hands, on his art, and only probably interest-attacked and laughed at by all his ing to artists. The chief point on which it insists, being in the undulat- Of these Wilkes and Churchill were ing line, called the line of beauty and the bitterest, and those who made their grace, and which Hogarth had some anger the most felt. Hogarth in a time before introduced upon his palette print called the "Times," published in in his own portrait. Of this line, he 1762, when he was sixty-five years old, claims to be the discoverer, and asserts ridiculed the opponents of the Ministry with truth, that nothing beautiful in and the friends of Wilkes, as agitators. nature is stiff or angular, the line of Wilkes, although not included in this grace being found in the undulating political caricature, wrote a furious hills, in the shape of the flower, and in North Briton attack (in number 17 of the beauty of man and woman, bird his paper) on "the King's Sergeant and beast. With one or two exceptions, Painter, William Hogarth," in which such as the leaves of the holly, the thistle, he accused him of being a vain, greedy and the various cacti, this is true, but and treacherous hanger-on, of a corrupt some denied the discovery, and asserted court. Hogarth replied with his pencil, that the principle was known to Michael and the print of Wilkes, which we have Angelo. A book from so universal a before described, appeared, and was satirist as Hogarth, was sure to be as-sold by thousands. Wilkes felt now sailed, and assailed it was by writers the sting of the satirist, and Churchill from Wilkes to Walpole. Every part the poet, who appears to have been of the work came in for a share of rough sincerely attached to the demagogue, enemies. patched up a print of Master Churchill in the character of a bear. The pleasure and pecuniary advantage derived from these two engravings, together with occasionally riding on horseback, restored me to as much health as can be expected at my time of life." came to his rescue, in a personal satire, by me, with some parts ready sunk, as called the "Epistle to Hogarth." The the background and the dog, I began quarrel only shows how furiously angry to consider how I could put so much men could abuse each other; both work laid aside to account, and so Wilkes and Churchill had been personal friends with the artist, and now they vigorously abused him. The world has much to regret in the loss of so vigorous a poet as Churchill, from the fact of his being led away to vice and dissipation. The satirist whom Cowper owned as his master, and who has much of the manly freedom and masterly ease of Dryden was an ally on the side of virtue, of whom the best might be proud. Alas, that he spent his talent upon personal abuse, or in vain regret. He attacked Hogarth as Pope attacked Dennis, upon his old age, and declared that malice led him to satirise Wilkes. "Malice (who, disappointed of her end, Whether to work the bane of foe or friend, verge, Had WILKES and LIBERTY escaped thy scourge. With all the symptoms of assured decay, Surely it is no crime to be sick and old, feeble and weak with disease. Hogarth might have retorted upon that weakness which proceeds from dissipation; more cutting probably was the allusion to Hogarth's failure. "Poor Sigismunda! what a fate is thine! Dryden, the great High Priest of all the nine Doth Sigismunda now devoted stand, Hogarth speaks thus lightly of the fray, but it probably broke his spirits and hurt his health. Churchill, who was an unfrocked clergyman, and a man of the loosest life, was unworthy of notice. A short time after he writes thus heartlessly of the old and failing painter. 66 (naming his mistress) tells me with a kiss, that I have already killed him. How sweet is flattery from the woman we love ;" and again, even more heartlessly, the malevolent satirist says-" he has broken into the pale of my private life, and has set the example of illiberality which I wanted, and as he is dying from the effects of my former chastisement, I will hasten his death by writing his elegy." Even Wilkes, debauched as he was, was more generous than Churchill: he remarked of his squinting portrait, "that he did not make himself," and therefore might be excused for being so very ugly, but Churchill exulted over the painter's failing health, and when he heard of his death, rejoiced that it was imputed to the terrors of his satire. We are now to chronicle the last work of Hogarth, which we think shows a failing power, and an exaggeration of which the painter was not always guilty. It is termed "Credulity, SuperThat these attacks wounded Hogarth stition, and Fanaticism," and seems to and hastened his decline, there can be be intended by the artist to show the little doubt. He retorted on Churchill, effects of a low conception of religion, by a caricature called "The Bruiser C. and also the idolatrous tendency of Churchill, (once the Rev.) in the cha- pictures and prints in churches or in racter of the Russian Hercules regaling books. A fierce preacher seems to be himself after having killed the monster condemning with terrific energy the Caricatura, that so galled his virtuous whole world to perdition, such is the friend, the heaven-born' Wilkes." fury of his looks and gestures. His Churchill was drawn as a canonical bear, congregation are in a terror of alarm, with a pot of porter and a knotted club, and are thrown into various gestures bearing on the various knots "Lye 1, typical of their state, and in the corner Lye 2," and so on, by his side Hogarth's the notorious Mrs. Tofts, whose imposdog tramples on his "Epistle to Ho-ture is unequalled in the annals of garth." The intrusion of the painter's credulity, seems to have added a quandog by the side of the "Russian bear" tity of monsters to the scene. At the is accounted for by Hogarth in the fol- window a Turk, calmly smoking, looks lowing manner: "having an old plate in at the window, apparently drawing a very satisfactory parallel between the workings of his religion and that which he witnesses The aim of Hogarth was no doubt good, but it is not too clearly perceived in this curious print, and those who sneer at religion, sometimes allude to this engraving as a proof that Hogarth sneered too, which is very far indeed from the fact. "Which I was born to introduce, Refined it first, and showed its use." ceived an agreeable letter from a friend, he wrote a rough draft of an answer, and finding himself weak, postponed writing the letter, and lay down upon his bed. He had lain but a short time when he was seized with a vomiting, and starting up, he rang the bell with such violence that he broke it. An affectionate female relative came to his The time had now come when he aid, and after two hours' intense sufferwas to find a consolation in religion. ing, he expired from a suffusion of He had bought a small house at Chis-blood among the arteries of his heart. wick, which yet remains; it is not very So lived and died William Hogarth, far from the one occupied by the Duke a genius entirely English, and master of Devonshire, and is still called Ho- of a style of which he might have said garth House, and to this he retired; at with Swift, that time indeed it might have been called retirement, for it was very pret tily situated, and the garden contained many fruit-trees, and in it he had buried his favourite dog, the headstone of whose grave, standing in a corner of the garden, close against the wall, still remains. The cottage has since been inhabited by another man of genius, the Rev. Henry Cary, the translator of Dante. It was in this cottage that Hogarth felt death coming upon him, but his spirits did not desert him; he seems to have summed up his actions of past life, and to have been as much as most men at peace with the world, and with his Creator. "I can safely assert," he writes, "that I have invariably endeavoured to make those about me tolerably happy; and my greatest enemy cannot say, that I ever did him an intentional injury; without ostentation I could produce many instances of men who have materially benefited by me. What may follow, God knows." This reasoning is scarcely satisfactory to the Christian, alas! That many men have materially benefited by our weak endeavours to do good is not sufficient; the better the man, the less confidently will he look back upon his past life; the great Newton talked sorrowfully of wasted time, and Coleridge, weeping, confessed that even then, in his last few days he, who had been praying all his life, scarcely knew "how to pray." On the 25th of October, 1764, Hogarth left Chiswick, and returned to Leicester Square. He was very weak, but at the same time extremely cheerful, and his mental powers were as perfectly unimpaired as ever. Physicians do not appear to have been with him, and of the nature of his complaint he himself was unaware. Having re And in which, although he has had many imitators, he has not had one worthy successor. His great success in his own peculiar style, and his entire difference from other painters, seems to lie in this, that he paints perfectly dramatically, and takes care to let his own peculiar mind pervade his pictures. No painter ever told a story better than Hogarth. He is not entirely a painter, he may be called an author, and viewed in that light we shall understand the answer given by the gentleman who, Charles Lamb tells us, being asked which book he preferred most, said, "Shakspere," and which next, said, 66 66 Hogarth." Most of his admirers have felt the truth of this; they read his pictures, at those of other painters they merely look. Great draughtsmen and fine colourists some artists may be, but they do not throw the soul into their pictures which Hogarth did. In the painted illustrations of the "Waverly Novels," or of "Gil Blas," or of the "Vicar of Wakefield," we see various figures over and over again, to represent the "Vicar," or "Gil Blas;" but in painting the "Rake" or Councillor Silvertongue," or "Viscount Squanderfelt," Hogarth has indelibly fixed them on our minds, and they will bear no second impression. All his pictures are of this kind. The puzzled face, rather indeed prosaic, of the distressed poet, we never forget; the vapid face of the young nobleman, the conceit of the Italian singer, are to us as much matters of fact and reality, as the madness of Don Quixote, or the burlesque cowardice of John Falstaff. More than this, Hogarth stands alone, he is sui generis, and with out a rival; Sir Joshua Reynolds fool- The history of his five days' peregrinaishly denied him the title of " painter." tion to Gravesend and Rochester will That he could paint, and in many points better and more solidly than Sir Joshua himself in his" flying colours," the scenes of the "Rake's Progress" in Sir John Soane's Museum, abundantly testify; but he does not want the petty title, he was no Royal Academician we know, but there have been many hundreds of painters, and but one Hogarth. Besides this, he was like all great men, evidently of his age, and yet beyond it. His satire upon its defective morals will testify the latter, and for the former we may cite Walpole. "The Rake's Levee Room," says that author, "The Nobleman's Dining-room, the apartments of the husband and wife, in the Marriage à la Mode, the Alderman's Parlour, the Bedchamber, and many others are the history of the manners of the age." show what sort of man he was, better than any laboured description. Under the town-hall in Rochester, the curious are still shown the place where he publicly played at hop-scotch with a jovial companion, to the great delight of the onlooking boys. His personal spirit was great, and he would resent any insult offered by any one, nor did he bend in any way to rank or power. He loved state in dress, and a certain decent order in his household; his wife who tenderly loved him, assisting him in entertaining his guests at a pleasant house and handsomely furnished table. "In his relations of husband, of brother, friend, and master," says Ireland, “he was kind, generous, sincere, and indulgent; in diet abstemious, but in his hospitalities, though devoid of ostentation, liberal and free-hearted, not parThis is high praise, "but greater yet simonious, yet frugal; but so compararemains behind;" he was not only the tively small were the rewards paid to historian, but the moralist of his time; artists, that after the labour of a long in openly reproving vice, he stood out life, he left an inconsiderable sum to beyond all other painters. Art in his his widow, with whom he must have hand did not degenerate into sensuous-received a very large portion." To this ness and prettiness, nor did he excite another biographer adds, that he was religion by the faces of meek Madonnas, very considerate and kind to all his or emaciated saints; but he showed servants, that they had remained many vice her own image, stamped the paltry and conceited coxcomb with a brand; placed abject poverty, copied with an unerring hand, by the side of prodigal and selfish wealth, and preached such a sermon thereon, as the world will not easily forget. If fame be worth any thing, he has fame enough; the portrait painters and effeminate flatterers of the day were ashamed to own his masculine genius; the sentence is now reversed, there is scarcely an educated Englishman, but who is proud to own that he is the countryman of William Hogarth. In his personal appearance, Hogarth was not singular. His portrait gives us a blunt English-looking face, marked with great determination and self-possession; his eye was peculiarly bright and penetrating, and his forehead high and broad. He was rather below the middle size, active in person, and bustling in manner, and fond of some little importance and state; he had a great deal of bonhommie, and was sought for as an excellent companion; when out on a trip or jaunt his spirits rose to a great height, and kept the company in a considerable state of amusement. years in his service, and that he painted all their portraits, and hung them up in his house. He used to study at all times and in all places; he would sketch any remarkable face which he saw, sometimes upon his nail. He was a great observer of the workings of the passions in the face. Barry once saw him patting the back of one of two fighting boys, who was hanging back from the fray, and telling him not to be a coward, all the while very attentively observing the face of the other. He went into good society, and dined with Gray, at the table of Horace Walpole. He left his wife by his will, all his property in his plates, the copyright of which was secured to her by Act of Parliament for twenty years; the number of impressions annually sold, produced a very respectable annual income, but she outlived her right and became reduced to the borders of want. The interposition of the king with the Royal Academy, procured for her a pension of £40 per annum, which she lived but two years to enjoy. Hogarth was buried plainly and without show, in the churchyard of |