family of Hanover, it is not impossible that the erection of George I. before Leicester House, might have been meant to annoy George II. Our own generation has just seen the last of the Canons horse and rider. After more than a quarter of a century of humiliations: after serving as a standing butt for Punch and his imitators: after being painted in divers unheraldic colours, and even spotted like the pard, black on a white ground, after appearing one morning with a paper fool's-cap over his leaden laurels, and his truncheon replaced by a Turk's-head besom: after losing his limbs one by one, and at last his head, till he lay a mere battered trunk under the belly of his steed, propped up by a broomstick, and with a great hole yawning in its back, where once the royal rider was riveted to his saddle, the last stage of degradation was reached, as here depicted.1 Such was the beginning, on November 19, 1748, and such the end on February 24, 1874, 1 From a sketch made last year by Mr. O'Connor, from his studio in Sir Joshua's old house. The room was Sir Joshua's drawing-room, and seems a very humble one for such distinguished assemblages as were often gathered there. of the Leicester Square statue, on which have been hung as many lampoons as on any statue in the world, except Pasquino. We may well say that George I. has now given place to a better man. It is amusing to read how within a few days of the statue being uncovered, the princely children and their young companions took part in a performance at Leicester House. The play was "Cato," of all plays in the world. "Cato!" Think of creatures between eleven and six, in the Roman stage costume of that time, doling out Addison's pompous and platitudinous blank verse. Little Prince George, afterwards George III., was Portius, and spoke a prologue, which made some noise at the time; Princess Augusta and Prince Edward shared the honours of the epilogue. In Prince George's prologue the applause, indoors and out, was loudest at Patriots indeed! Worthy that honest name, CHAPTER XII. HOGARTH AT THE GOLDEN HEAD. HE life of him who best deserves the title of the founder of the English school of painting, and the most national of English painters, has Leicester Fields for its centre. It was in Cranbourne Alley, probably between 1712 and 1719, that William Hogarth served his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble, silversmith. It was in Leicester Fields, under the sign of the Golden Head, made of pieces of cork, cut, glued together, and gilded by Hogarth himself, in the last house but two on the east side, afterwards the northern half of the Sablonière Hôtel, and now replaced by the lately rebuilt Tenison Schools, that in 1733, the same year in which his old master be |