then very common, nor was the style of their execution in general at all creditable to art. In Mortraye's Travels there are fourteen cuts bearing the name of Hogarth:-seven more may be found in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, printed in 1724; in Beaver's Military Punishments of the Ancients there are fifteen headpieces; and five frontispieces from the same hand decorate the five volumes of Cassandra, printed in 1725. "No symptoms of genius," says Walpole, "dawned in those plates." There is indeed little of that peculiar spirit which distinguished his after-works; but they are well worth examination, were it but to learn the lesson which genius reckons ungracious-that no distinction is to be obtained without long study and well-directed labour.

Into the Hudibras published in 1726, a larger portion of his satiric spirit was infused. "This was among the first of his works," observes Walpole," that marked him as a man above the common; yet, in what made him then noticed, it surprises me now to find so little humour in an undertaking so congenial to his talents." This censure

is to be admitted with some abatement. That he has given in the seventeen plates of that performance vivid and accurate images of his witty original, I am not prepared to say. It is seldom that the pencil catches the same inspiration as the pen, and it would be wonderful if it did. There are many bright points and graces in poetry on which painting can find no colours to bestow-which look simple and seem easy to be imbodied, but which are too elusive and quicksilvery to take a hue and shape. The poetry of Butler, graphic as it is, and full of images of fun and humour, will always keep its ascendency-and, in the width of its range and by the rapidity of its motion, baffle the rivalry of any pencil. It is not where Hogarth has followed, but where he has departed from the poet, that the charm

of his embellishments lies. By one or two skilful additions, awakening a similar train of thought and humour, he has increased the graphic glee of his

author.

The work was published by subscription, and Allan Ramsay, the poet-a man after Hogarth's own heart, and not unlike him in look—a lover of rough ready wit, broad humour, and social merriment— subscribed-he was a bookseller as well as a poetfor thirty copies. Twelve of the plates were published separately, and inscribed by the artist to "William Ward, of Great Houghton, Northamptonshire, and Allan Ramsay, of Edinburgh." A little praise was then valuable; kindness shown to genius at the commencement of its career is seldom forgotten. A friendly intercourse (of which, however, I can discover no farther traces than some hasty lines by the poet) seems to have been carried on after this between Ramsay and Hogarth. But the poet's son forgot his father's affection, in the feud which arose between the members of the fraternity of painters and Hogarth. The animosities of artists are only surpassed in sharpness and malignity by those of religious sects.

A patron very different from the poet of the Gentle Shepherd appeared in the person of W. Bowles, of the Black Horse in Cornhill. "I have been told," says Nichols, "that he bought many a plate from Hogarth by the weight of the copper, but am only certain that this occurrence happened in a single instance, when the elder Bowles offered, over a bottle, half a crown a pound weight for a plate just then completed." This story is an odd one; and yet there can be little doubt of its truth ;-nor indeed was it to every one that the generous Bowles offered such high terms. Major, the engraver, said, that when he was young and desirous to go abroad for improvement, he offered for sale two plates of landscapes, one of them called Evening, which he had

just finished. This was one of his best works. Bowles was much pleased with the performance, and said, as improvement was Mr. Major's object, he would give him in exchange two pieces of plain copper of the same dimensions. This patron had the true English notion of things. Thornhill sold paintings to the government at two guineas the Flemish ell; and Hogarth's engravings were estimated at half a crown per pound avoirdupois.

Though Hogarth at this period used both the crayon and the brush, he was still little known except as an engraver. He was looked upon generally as a mere etcher of copper, and his productions were regarded -I copy with shame and anger the unjust and injurious language of Fuseli-" as the chronicle of scandal and the history-book of the vulgar." If a man like Fuseli could write thus when Hogarth had the fame of many years on his head, we may wonder less at the conduct of one Morris, an upholsterer, who engaged him in 1727 to make a design for tapestry, and afterward discovered to his confusion that he had commissioned an engraver instead of a painter. The work ordered by the upholsterer was a representation of the element Earth; and in what fashion the task was performed cannot now be known. Morris, however, refused to pay for it, and was sued for the price-twenty pounds for workmanship, and ten pounds for materials.

66

"I was informed," said the defendant, when the trial came on before the Lord Chief Justice, "by Mr. Hogarth, that he was skilled in painting, and could execute the design of the element of the Earth in a workmanlike manner. On learning, however, afterward that he was an engraver and not a painter, I became uneasy, and sent one of my servants to him, who stated my apprehensions; to which Mr. Hogarth replied, that it was certainly a bold and unusual kind of undertaking, and if Mr. Morris did not like it when finished he should not be

asked to pay for it. The work was completed and sent home, but my tapestry-workers, who are mostly foreigners, and some of them the finest hands in Europe, and perfect judges of performances of that nature, were all of opinion that it was not finished in a workmanlike manner, and that it was impossible to execute tapestry by it."-Such was this classical upholder's defence-and it prevailed.

Patronage by the pound weight, and jury-verdicts which refused to him the name of a painter, suited ill with the haughty heart and sarcastic spirit of Hogarth. A more congenial subject than that suggested by Mr. Morris ere long presented itself, and called forth his proper powers. Bambridge, warden of the Fleet Prison, and Huggins, his predecessor, were accused, in 1729, before the House of Commons, of breaches of trust, extortions, and cruelties, and sent to Newgate. The examination passed in the presence of Hogarth, who sketched the scene in a way which has called the following happy description from the pen of Walpole.

"The scene is a committee of the Commons; on the table are the instruments of torture. in rags and half starved appears before them; the A prisoner poor man has a good countenance, which adds to the interest. On the other hand is the inhuman jailer. It is the very figure which Salvator Rosa would have drawn for Iago in the moment of detection. Villany, fear, and conscience are mixed in yellow and livid upon his countenance, his lips are contracted by tremor, his face advances as eager to lie, his legs step back as thinking to make his escape, one hand is thrust forward into his bosom, the fingers of the other are catching uncertainly at his button holes. If this was a portrait, it is the most striking that ever was drawn-if it was not, still finer." The face was that of Bambridge--the rest was the imagination of the artist.

By labouring for the booksellers, and by designing
VOL. I.-G

and etching little scenes of town life and folly, Hogarth succeeded in gradually withdrawing himself from the drudgery of his original profession, and in establishing a name with the world for satiric skill and dramatic sketching. But the prices which he obtained were small; so little, indeed, compared with what others received then, and what he was afterward paid, that he seems ashamed to mention them. He could not disguise from himself that artists of very inferior powers, but of more courtly address, were growing rich by painting portraits of the opulent and the vain, and lived in spendour and affluence. Kent, the architect and painter, seems to have fixed, if he did not merit, Hogarth's peculiar indignation: he was (as we have already seen) the first artist who felt the touch of his satiric hand. This man had painted an altarpiece for St. Clement's Church, sufficiently absurd of itself for all the purposes of ridicule; but Hogarth was not satisfied till he had increased the public merriment by a caricature. There was indeed little to do, but it was done effectually. No wonder that Hogarth was indignant at the popularity of such a pretender in painting as Kent, who, not contented with the fame of an architect and ornamental gardener, aspired also to the merits of sculpture, and encumbered Westminster Abbey with some of his absurd conceptions. For his popularity we have the words of Walpole. was not only consulted for furniture, as frames of pictures, glasses, tables, chairs, &c., but for plate, for a barge, for a cradle. And so impetuous was fashion, that two great ladies prevailed on him to make designs for their birth-day gowns. The one he dressed in a petticoat decorated with columns of the five orders, and the other like a bronze, in a cop per-coloured satin, with ornaments of gold."

"He

The unsparing ridicule which the prints of Hogarth threw on this personage, was very acceptable to Sir James Thornhill, who, desirous of distinction