knowledge in my art. A choice of composition was the next thing to be considered, and my constitutional idleness naturally led me to the use of such materials as I had previously collected; and to this I was further induced by thinking, that if properly combined, they might be made the most useful to society in painting, although similar subjects had often failed in writing and preaching."

From a mind so formed, a hand so diligent, and a spirit so observing, it was natural to expect something striking and original. Of his first attempt at satire, the following story is related by Nichols, who had it from one of Hogarth's fellow-workmen. One summer Sunday, during his apprenticeship, he went with three companions to Highgate, and the weather being warm and the way dusty, they went into a public house and called for ale. There happened to be other customers in the house, who to free drinking added fierce talking, and a quarrel ensued. One of them on receiving a blow with the bottom of a quart pot, looked so ludicrously rueful, that Hogarth snatched out a pencil and sketched him as he stood. It was very like and very laughable, and contributed to the restoration of order and good-humour. On another occasion he strolled, with Hayman the painter, into a cellar, where two women of loose life were quarrelling in their cups. One of them filled her mouth with brandy and spirted it dexterously in the eyes of her antagonist. "See! see!" said Hogarth, taking out his tablet and sketch ing her "look at the brimstone's mouth." This virago figures in Modern Midnight Conversation.

Anecdotes such as these were related in vain to Lord Orford, who was too dainty and delicate to be the biographer of a man who searched in scenes of low sensuality, as well as elsewhere, for the materials of his productions. That a biographer with gold buckles in his shoes should hesitate to follow the steps of one who was no picker of paths, was

natural; nor is it matter of surprise that a Horace Walpole should conclude the conversation of a Hogarth to have been gross, and his mind uninformed.-Lord Orford considered all men as uninformed who had not received a University education; and all human beings as gross in conversation, who were unacquainted with the conventional courtesies of fashionable life.

Ireland, too, in a work full of information concerning our artist's compositions and character, considers him as an unenlightened man, and one who "had not much bias towards what has obtained the name of learning."

If Hogarth showed little bias towards learning, it was because his powerful mind was directed to studies where the knowledge of actual life in all its varieties was chiefly essential-where an eye for the sarcastic and the ludicrous, and a mind to penetrate motives and weigh character, were worth all the lights of either school or college. But there is no proof that he was a man gross and uninformed, or that he thought lightly of learning. He was indeed a zealous worshipper of knowledge; but he loved to pluck the fruit fresh from the tree with his own hand. Of want of learning no man of Hogarth's pitch of mind will boast; it is the opensesame which clears up the mysteries of ancient lore, and acquaints us with the lofty souls and social sympathies of the great worthies of the world. Our artist had not time for every thing; he could not, circumstanced as he was, have been both a scholar of any eminence, and the first man in a new walk of art. But it is unjust to set him down as despising in the abstract, what his own great natural genius enabled him to do without.

Ireland having asserted that Hogarth had little bias towards learning, and Walpole that he was gross and ignorant, Nichols brings against him the additional charge of extreme poverty in his earlier

years. There is no proof that he suffered under the twofold evil of ignorance and want. That his parents were poor, we have his own admission; but he never spoke of absolute indigence. The wages of industry would do the same for him as for others: his food might be plain and his dress coarse-his lodgings mean, and little money in his pocket; still he was no object of compassion, while the expense of his living was covered by his earnings. "Owing," says Hogarth, "to my desire to qualify myself for engraving on copper, and to the loss which I sustained by piratical copies of some of my early and most popular prints, I could do little more than maintain myself until I was near thirty; but even then I was a punctual paymaster.”

"Being one day," says Nichols, "distressed to raise so trifling a sum as twenty shillings-in order to be revenged of his landlady, who strove to compel him to payment, he drew her as ugly as possible, and in that single portrait gave marks of the dawn of superior genius. Other authorities intimate that had such an accident ever happened to Hogarth, he would hardly have failed to talk of it afterward, as he was always fond of contrasting the necessities of his youth with the affluence of his maturer age. He has been heard to say of himself, "I remember the time when I have gone moping into the city with scarce a shilling, but as soon as I have received ten guineas there for a plate, I have returned home, put on my sword, and sallied out again with all the confidence of a man who had thousands in his pockets."

That young Hogarth held the same contest with fortune for bread, which is the usual lot of unfriended genius, there can be little doubt. Before the world felt his talents, and while he was storing his mind and his portfolio with nature and character, then was the season of fluctuating spirits, rising and falling hopes, churlish landladies, and importunate

creditors. When he had conquered all these difficulties, his vanity-and who would not be vain in such circumstances-loved to dwell on those scenes of labour and privation, and fight over again the battle which ended so honourably to him as a man, and so gloriously to him as an artist. But, even under the worst view which he himself gives of his condition, one can hardly call Hogarth poor; he paid all he owed he had a sword at home, a shilling in his pocket, and an engraving in his hands which raised ten guineas. With a head so clear, hands so clever, and youth and independent feelings on his side, he could not be destitute-and he never was.

With much appearance of accuracy Ireland releases him from his apprenticeship in 1718, when he was one-and-twenty years old; and Walpole sends him to the academy in St. Martin's Lane, where he "studied drawing from the life, in which he never attained great excellence." Of his habits of diligence in drawing from set figures I have already spoken, and in his own words; he loved rather to study in the wild academy of nature, and to seek in life for those materials with which neither lectures nor examples could supply him.-If we allow seven years for the term of his apprenticeship, he must have been indentured at fourteen; his father, therefore, may be relieved from the suspicion of inattention to his education-he seems to have instilled as much knowledge into the mind of his only son as was consistent with the boy's years and habits.

The first work which appeared from the hand of Hogarth was called "The Taste of the Town,”engraven in 1724. The reigning follies of the day were sharply lashed; and the town was so much taken with this satiric image of itself, that it became profitable to pirate the piece: a fraud which deprived the artist of the fruit of his labour, and compelled him to sell his etchings at any price the piratical printseller chose to give. "The Taste of the

Town," says Ireland, " is now entitled The Small Masquerade Ticket, or Burlington Gate, in which the follies of the town are severely satirized by the representation of multitudes properly habited crowding to the masquerade. The leader of the figures wears a cap and bells, and a garter round his right leg, while before him a satyr holds a purse containing a thousand pounds—a satirical glance at majesty; the kneeling figure, pouring eight thousand pounds at the feet of Cuzzoni, the Italian singer, has been said to resemble Lord Peterborough. Opera, masque, and pantomime are in glory, while the works of our great dramatists are trundled to oblivion on a wheelbarrow. On the summit of Burlington Gate he placed the fashionable artist William Kent, brandishing his palette and pencils, with Michael Angelo and Raphael for supporters."

At this time it appears that he did not apply himself wholly to original composition; he had a mo. ther and sisters to assist, and-success in his new and original path being uncertain-continued to make sure of bread by engraving arms and crests. Coats of arms, symbols, ciphers, shop bills, and etchings on bowls and tankards have been since collected and shown to the world as productions of the early days of Hogarth. That some of those bear an impress like his I mean not to deny, but all the works which the necessities of genius compel it to perform, are not therefore excellent and worthy of being treasured up. The poet wisely says, "That strong necessity is supreme among the sons of men." All artists are more or less compelled to toil for subsistence; and even the most fortunate often execute commissions alien to their feelings. By these things they should not be judged.

Hogarth soon felt where his strength was to lieand others began to feel it too. The booksellers employed him to embellish books with cuts and frontispieces. Illustrations of literature were not