I.—Little Boy Hogarth.
“The Life and Adventures of William Hogarth,”—that would be a taking title, indeed! To do for the great painter of manners that which Mr. Forster has done for their great describer, would be a captivating task; and, successfully accomplished, might entitle a man to wear some little sprig of laurel in his cap, and rest, thenceforth, on his oars. It is not my fortune to have the means of writing such a book; and, for many reasons, this performance must be limited to a series of Essays upon the genius and character of the Man Hogarth; upon the Work he was permitted, by a healthful, sanguine constitution and by great powers of will and self-reliance backboning an unflagging industry, to get through in his appointed span here below; and upon the curious quaint Time in which he lived and did his work. Hogarth’s life, away from his works and times, would be but a barren theme. Those old Italian painting men had strange adventures and vicissitudes. Rafaelle’s life was one brief glorious romance. Leonardo had a king’s arms to die in. Buonarotti lived amidst battles and sieges, and held flouting matches with popes. Titian’s pencil was picked up by an emperor. The Germans and Dutchmen, even, were picturesque and eventful in their careers. Was not Rubens an ambassador? Are there not mysterious dealings between Rembrandt and the Jews that have not yet been fathomed? Did not Peter de Laar kill a monk? But in what manner is the historian to extract exciting elements from the history of a chubby little man in a cocked hat and scarlet roque-laure, who lived at the sign of the “Painter’s Head” in Leicester Fields, and died in his bed there in competence and honour; who was the son of a schoolmaster in the Old Bailey, and the descendant of a long line of north country yeomen, of whom the prime progenitor is presumed to have kept pigs and to have gone by the rude name of “Hogherd”—whence Hogard and Hogart, at last liquefied into Hogarth? Benvenuto Cellini worked for the silversmiths, but at least he had poniarded his man and lain for his sins in the dungeons of St. Angelo; our Hogarth was a plain silversmith’s apprentice, in Cranbourn Alley. He kept a shop afterwards, and engraved tankards and salvers, and never committed a graver act of violence than to throw a pewter pot at the head of a ruffian who had insulted him during an outing to Highgate. Honest man! they never sent him to Newgate or the Tower. Only once he was clapped up for an hour or so in a Calais guardhouse, and, coming home by the next packet-boat, took a stout revenge on the frog-eaters with his etching needle upon copper. He was no great traveller; and beyond the Calais ship just spoken of, does not appear to have undertaken any journeys more important than the immortal excursion to Rochester, of which the chronicle, illustrated by his own sketches, is still extant, (those doughty setters-forth from the Bedford Head were decidedly the first Pickwickians,) and a jaunt to St. Alban’s after Culloden, to sketch the trapped fox Simon Fraser Lord Lovat, as he sate in the inn-room under the barber’s hands, counting the dispersed Highland clans and their available forces of caterans and brae-men on his half-palsied, crooked, picking and stealing fingers.
William Hogarth did but one romantic thing in his life, and that was, to run away with Sir James Thornhill’s pretty daughter; and even that escapade soon resolved itself into a cheery, English, business-like, house-keeping union. Papa-in-law—who painted cathedral cupolas at forty shillings a yard—forgave William and Jane. William loved his wife dearly—she had her tempers, and he was not a man of snow—took a country house for her, and set up a coach when things were going prosperously and he was Sergeant Painter to King George; and when William (not quite a dotard, as the twin-scamps Wilkes and Churchill called him) died, Jane made a comfortable living by selling impressions of the plates he had engraved. These and the writing of the Analysis of Beauty, the dispute concerning Sigismunda, the interest taken in the welfare of the Foundling Hospital, the dedication [in a pique against the king who hated “boets and bainters,”] of the March to Finchley to Frederick the Great, and the abortive picture auction scheme, are very nearly all the notable events in the life of William Hogarth. And yet the man left a name remembered now with affection and applause, and which will be remembered, and honoured, and glorified when, to quote the self-conscious Unknown who used the Public Advertiser as a fulcrum for that terrible lever of his, “kings and ministers are forgotten, the force and direction of personal satire are no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest consequences.”
By the announcement, then, that I do not contemplate, here, a complete biography of Hogarth: that I do not know enough to complete a reliable and authentic life: “nec, si sciam, dicere ausim:” these papers are to be considered but as “Mémoires pour servir;” little photographs and chalk studies of drapery, furniture, accessories of costume and snuff-box, cocked hat and silver buckle detail, all useful enough in their place and way, but quite subordinate and inferior to the grand design and complete picture of the hero. I am aware that high critical authorities have been inveighing lately against the employment of the costumiers and bric a brac shop-keepers and inventory takers’ attributes in biography; and writers are enjoined, under heavy penalties, to be, all of them, Plutarchs, and limn their characters in half a dozen broad vigorous dashes. It can conduce little, it has been argued, towards our knowledge of the Seven Years’ War to be told that Frederick the Great wore a pigtail, and that to his jackboots “Day and Martin with their soot-pots were forbidden to approach;” and it has been asked whether any likelihood exists of our knowing more of the character of Napoleon Bonaparte from the sight of his cocked hat and toothbrush at Madame Tussaud’s. Presuming to run counter to the opinion of the high critical authorities, I would point out that the very best biographies that have ever been written—those of Samuel Johnson, Samuel Pepys [his diary being eminently biographical], Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Jean Jacques Rousseau [in the Confessions, and bating the lies and madnesses with which that poor crazed wanderer disfigures an otherwise limpid narrative]—are full of those little scraps and fragments of minute cross-hatching, chronicles of “seven livres three sols, parisis,” lamentable records of unpaid-for hose, histories of joyous carouses, anecdotes of men and women’s meannesses and generosities, and the like. On the other hand, how cold, pallid, unhuman, is the half-dozen-line character, with all its broad vigorous dashes! Certain Roman emperors might have come out far better fellows from the historian’s alembic if their togas and sandals had been more scrupulously dwelt upon. Is our awful veneration for St. Augustine one whit diminished by the small deer he condescends to hunt in the history of his youth? The heaviest blow and greatest discouragement to the composition of admirable biographies, are in the fact that strength and delicacy, vigour and finish, are seldom combined; and that a Milton with a dash of the macaroni in him is a rara avis indeed. Now and then we find an elephant that can dance on the tight-rope without being either awkward or grotesque; now and then we find a man with a mind like a Nasmyth’s steam hammer, that can roll out huge bars of iron, and anon knock a tin-tack into a deal board with gentle accurate taps. These are the men who can describe a Revolution, and by its side the corned beef and carrots which country parsons were once glad to eat; who can tell us how the Bastille was stormed, and, a few pages on, what manner of coat and small clothes wore Philip Egalité at his guillotining. When we find such men we christen them Macaulay or Carlyle.
The latitude, therefore, I take through incapacity for accuracy, saves me from inflicting on you a long prolegomena; saves me from scoring the basement of this page with foot-notes, or its margins with references; saves me from denouncing the “British Dryasdust,” from whom I have culled the scanty dates and facts, the mile and year stones in William Hogarth’s life. Indeed, he has been very useful to me, this British Dryasdust, and I should have made but a sorry figure without him. He or they—Nichols, Steevens, Trusler, Rouquet, Ireland, Ducarel, Burn—have but little to tell; but that which they know, they declare in a frank, straightforward manner. Among commentators on Hogarth, Ireland is the best; Trusler, the worst. T. Clerk and T. H. Horne also edited (1810) a voluminous edition of Hogarth’s works, accompanied by a sufficiently jejune Life. Allan Cunningham, in the British Painters, has given a lively, agreeable adaptation of all who have come before him, spiced and brightened by his own clear appreciation of, and love for, art and its professors. Half a day’s reading, however, will tell you all that these writers know. Horace Walpole for criticism on Hogarth is admirable; lucid, elegant, and—a wonder with the dilettante friend of Madame du Deffand—generous. The mere explicatory testimony as to the principal Hogarthian series or engraved dramas by the Sire Rouquet [he was a Swiss] cited above, is valuable; the more so, that he was a friend of the painter, and, it is conjectured, took many of his instructions viva voce from William Hogarth himself. The Germans have not been indifferent to the merits of the great humoristic painter; and a certain Herr Von Fürstenburg has found out some odd things connected with suggestive objects in one of the most famous scenes of the first series—the Kate Hackabout, Mother Needham, and Colonel Charteris epopœiœ—never dreamt of previously in the good people of England’s philosophy. Occasionally, too, in a French Revue, you meet with an Etude on La vie et les ouvrages de Hogarth, giving us little beyond a fresh opportunity to be convinced that, if there exist on earth a people of whose manners and customs the French know considerably less than about those of the man in the moon, that people are the English.
By his own countrymen, William Hogarth has ever been justly and honourably treated. He was an outspoken man, and his pencil and graver were as unbridled as his tongue. His works have a taint of the coarseness, but not of the vice of his age. Most at home would be many of his works, perhaps, in low tap-rooms and skittle-alleys; but he was no Boucher or Fragonard to paint alcoves or dessus de portes for the contemporary Cotillons I. and Cotillons II., for the Pompadours and Dubarrys of Louis the well-beloved. He was vulgar and ignoble frequently, but the next generation of his countrymen forgave him these faults—forgave him for the sake of his honesty, his stern justice, his unbending defence of right and denunciation of wrong. This philosopher ever preached the sturdy English virtues that have made us what we are. He taught us to fear God and honour the King; to shun idleness, extravagance, and dissipation; to go to church, help the poor, and treat dumb animals with kindness; to abhor knavery, hypocrisy, and avarice. For this reason is it that Sectarianism itself (though he was hard against tub-thumping) has raised but a very weak and bleating voice against Hogarth’s “improprieties;” that cheap and popular editions of his works have been multiplied, even in this fastidious nineteenth century; that in hundreds of decorous family libraries a plump copy of Hogarth complete may be found [yes: I have heard the stateliest old ladies chat about the history of Kate Hackabout, and I have seen age explaining to youth and beauty—that came in a carriage to Marlborough House—the marvellous Marriage à la Mode in the Vernon collections]; that, finally—and which may be regarded as a good and gratifying stamp of the man’s excellence and moral worth—the Church of England have always been favourable to William Hogarth. An Anglican bishop wrote the poetic legends to the Rake’s Progress; and Hogarth has been patronized by the beneficed and dignified clergy ever since.
So come, then, William Hogarth, and let me in these essays strive to glorify thy painting, thy engraving, and thy philosophy. Let me stand over against thee, and walk round thee—yea, and sometimes wander for a little while quite away from thee, endeavouring to explore the timeous world as thou knew it. But be thou always near: the statue on the pedestal, the picture on the wall, the genius of the place, to recall me when I stray, to remind me when I am forgetful, to reprove me when I err!
Born in the Old Bailey, and the ninth year of William the Dutchman, that should properly be my starting point; but the reader must first come away with me to Westmoreland, and into the Vale of Bampton—to a village sixteen miles north of Kendal and Windermere Lake. In this district had lived for centuries a family of yeomen, called Hogart or Hogard: the founder of the family, as I have hinted, may have been Hogherd, from his vocation—a guardian of swine. His father, perchance, was that Gurth, the son of Beowulph, erst thrall to Cedric the Saxon, and who, after his emancipation by the worthy but irascible Franklin for good suit and service rendered in the merry greenwood, gave himself, or had given to him in pride and joy, that which he had never had before—a surname; and so, emigrating northwards, became progenitor of a free race of Hogherds. In this same Bampton Vale, the Hogarts possessed a small freehold; and of this tenement, the other rude elders being beyond my ken, the grandfather of the painter was holder in the middle of the seventeenth century. To him were three sons. The eldest succeeded to the freehold, and was no more heard of, his name being written in clods. He tilled the earth, ate of its fruits, and, his time being come, died. The two remaining sons, as the custom of Borough English did not prevail in Bampton, had to provide for themselves. Son intermediate—my William’s uncle—was a genius. Adam Walker, writer on natural philosophy, and who was the friend and correspondent of Nicholls of the Anecdotes, called him a “mountain Theocritus;” his contemporaries, with less elegance but more enthusiasm, dubbed him “Auld Hogart.” He was a poet, humorist, satirist, and especially a dramatist; and coarse plays of his, full of coarse fun, rough and ready action, and sarcastic hard hitting, yet linger, more by oral tradition than by any manuscript remains of his, among the Westmoreland fells. These were all written, too, in the very hardest, thickest, and broadest Westmoreland dialect; a patois to which Tim Bobbin’s Lancashire dialect is as mellifluous as the langue d’oc; a patois which has been compared to the speech of Demosthenes before his course of pebbles, but which, to my ears, offers more analogy to that which may have proceeded from the famous Anti-Philippian orator during the pebble probation; and in order to speak which patois fluently (after the pebbles), an admirable apprenticeship is to fill your mouth as full as possible of the gritty oatcake, or “clapt bread,” which is kept in the “cratch,” or rack suspended from the ceiling in Westmoreland farmhouses. In this Scythian speech, however, “auld Hogart” concocted a famous drama, quite in the Lope de Vega’s manner, called Troy Taken. I do not compare the play unadvisedly with those of the prolific Spanish playwright. You know how artfully Lope’s plays begin: with what immediate action and seduction of its audience to a foregone conclusion. The curtain draws up. A man in a cloak crosses the stage. A masked cavalier rushes after him with a drawn sword. There is a rixe at once established; the audience begin to imagine all sorts of terrible things, and the success of the piece is half assured. So “auld Hogart’s” play of Troy Taken, begins with a rixe. Paris is seen in the very act of running away with Helen; and Menelaus runs after them, calling “Stop thief!” With such an auspicious commencement, and plenty of good boisterous episodes throughout: Hector dragged about by the heels; Thersites cudgelled within an inch of his life; Achilles storming for half an hour at the loss of Patrocles, and a real wooden horse to finish up with: the whole spiced with “auld Hogart’s” broadest jokes: who can wonder that Troy Taken achieved immense popularity, and that years after the death of the facetious author, natural philosopher Adam Walker saw the piece performed from recollection by the Troutbeck rustics, the stage a greensward, the auditorium a grassy knoll, the canopy, Heaven? The proceedings were inaugurated by a grand cavalcade, headed by the minstrels of five parishes, and a lusty yeoman mounted on a bull’s back and playing on the fiddle; and as a prologue to Troy Taken, there was a pilgrimage of the visitors to a stone dropped by the enemy of mankind in an unsuccessful attempt to build a bridge across Windermere!
The brother of the “auld” dramatist of the Iliad, and third son of the Bampton yeoman, was Richard Hogart. Without being dogmatical, I trust that I am justified in the assumption that the “liquefaction” of the patronymic into Hogarth was due partly to the more elegant education of this yeoman’s son, partly to our painter’s formation of a “genteel” connection, when he married Jane Thornhill. I have not seen his indentures; and take the authority of Ireland for the registry of his birth; but it is certain that he was at one period called,—ay, and pretty well known—as Hogart: witness Swift, in his hideously clever satire of the Legion Club:—
“How I want thee, hum’rous Hogart,
Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art”—
Now Swift wrote this in Ireland, at a distance from means of accuracy, and the “pleasant rogue’s” name was not likely to be found in a calendar of the nobility and gentry. If Bolingbroke or Pope had written to the dean about the rogue and his pleasantries, it is very probable that they might have spelt his name “Hogart,” “Hogard,” “Hoggert,” or “Hogarth.” You must remember that scores of the most distinguished characters of the eighteenth century were of my Lord Malmesbury’s opinion concerning orthography, that neither the great Duke of Marlborough, nay, nor his duchess, the terrible “old Sarah,” nay, nor Mrs. Masham, nay, nor Queen Anne herself, could spell, and that the young Pretender (in the Stuart papers) writes his father’s name thus: “Gems” for “James.” Again, Swift may have suppressed the “th” for mere rhythmical reasons; just as Pope, aux abois between dactyls and spondees, barbarized a name which undeniably before had been pronounced “Saint John” into “Sinjin.” But, on the other hand, Jonathan Swift was not so dizzy when he wrote the Legion Club to have lost one pin’s point of his marvellous memory; and he was too rich in rhymes to have resorted to the pusillanimous expedient of cutting off a letter. If ever a man lived who could have found an easy rhyme to “Hippopotamus,” it was the Dean of St. Patrick’s. I opine, therefore, that when Swift first heard of Hogarth—in the early days of George I.—he was really called “Hogart;” that such a name was carried by the dean with him to Dublin, and that the change to “Hogart” only took place when the great Drapier was dying “in a rage, like a poisoned rat in a hole.”
Richard Hogart—whatever he called himself in the scholastic Latinity that converted “Saumaise” into “Salmasius,” and a Dutch logician, “Smygel” into “Smeglesius,”—was educated at St. Bees’ College, in Westmoreland; was too poor, it is thought, after his college course to take orders, and kept school for a time in his native county. His classical accomplishments were considerable. In the manuscript department of the British Museum are preserved some Latin letters by him; and he wrote besides a Latin-English dictionary, and a school-book entitled Grammar Disputatations, which has not attained the fame or immortality of the works of Cocker and Walkingame. It is stated that Richard Hogart was occasionally employed as a corrector of the press; an office then frequently discharged by trustworthy scholars quite extraneous to the recognized staff of the printing-office.
It is certain that, William and Mary reigning, Dominic Hogart came to London, and established himself as a schoolmaster, in Ship Court, Old Bailey. He had married, as it is the wont of poor schoolmasters to do, and his wife bare him two daughters and one son. The girls were Mary and Anne; and have only to be mentioned to pass out of this record:—Who cares about Joseph Mallard Turner’s nephews and nieces? The boy, William Hogarth, was born on the 10th of November, 1697, and stands in the parish register of St. Bartholomew the Great, as having been baptized, November the 28th.
You do not expect me to tell who nursed little chubby-baby Hogarth, whether he took to his pap kindly, and at what age he first evinced an affection for sweet-stuff? Making, however, a very early halt in his nonage, I am compelled to shake my head at a very pretty legend about him, and as prettily made into a picture, some years ago. According to this, little boy Hogarth was sent to a dame’s school, where he much vexed the good woman who boasted “unruly brats with birch to tame,” by a persistence in drawing caricatures on his slate. The picture represents him in sore disgrace, mounted on the stool of repentance, crowned with the asinine tiara of tribulation, holding in one hand the virgal rod of anguish, and in the other the slate which has brought him to this evil estate: a slate much bechalked with libellous representations of his dame. In the background is that Nemesis in a mob-cap, inflexible; around, an amphitheatre of children-spectators; the boys, as suits their boisterous character, jeering and exultant; the girls, as beseems their softer nature, scared and terrified. A very pretty, naïve picture, but apocryphal, I fear. There were no slates in dame-schools in those days. The hornbook, Pellucid, with its Christ Cross Row, was the beginning of knowledge, as the “baleful twig” that “frayed” the brats was the end thereof. If little boy Hogarth had been born at Kirby Thore, I would have admitted the dame-school theory in an instant; but it is far more feasible that he learnt his hornbook at his mother’s knee, and in due time was promoted to a bench in the school his father taught, and an impartial share in the stripes which the good pedagogue distributed. Nor need Dominie Hogart have been by any means a cruel pedagogue. In none of his pictures does Hogarth display any rancour against scholastic discipline (what school-scenes that pencil might have drawn!), and it generally happens that he who has suffered much in the flesh as a boy, will have a fling at the rod and the ferule when he is a man; even if he have had Orbilius for his father. And be it kept in mind, that, although the awful Busby, who called the birch “his sieve,” through which the cleverest boys must pass, and who of the Bench of Bishops taught sixteen mitred ones, was but just dead. Mr. John Locke was then also publishing his admirable treatise on Education, a treatise that enjoins and inculcates tenderness and mercy to children.
Ship Court, Old Bailey, is on the west side of that ominous thoroughfare, and a few doors from Ludgate Hill. By a very curious coincidence, the house No. 67, Old Bailey, corner of Ship Court, was occupied, about forty years ago, by a certain William Hone, an odd, quaint, restless man, but marvellously bustling and energetic: a man not to be “put down” by any magnates, civic, Westmonasterian, or otherwise; and who, at 67, had a little shop, where he sold prints and pamphlets, so very radical in their tendencies as to be occasionally seditious, and open to some slight accusation of ribaldry and scurrility. Here did Hone publish, in 1817, those ribald parodies of the Litany and Catechism for which he stood three trials before the then Lord Ellenborough, who vehemently assumed the part of public prosecutor (staining his ermine by that act), and tried his utmost to have Hone cast, but in vain. As to William Hone, the man drifted at last, tired, and I hope ashamed, out of sedition and sculduddry, and, so far as his literary undertakings went, made a good end of it. To him we owe those capital table-books, every-day books, and year-books, full of anecdote, quaint research, and folk-lore, which have amused and instructed so many thousands, and have done such excellent service to the book-making craft. Be you sure that I have Mr. Hone’s books for the table, day and year, before me, as I write, and shall have them these few months to come. Without such aids; without Mr. Cunningham’s Handbook and Mr. Timbs’ Curiosities of London; without Walpole, Cibber, and “Rainy-day Smith;” without Ned Ward and Tom Brown; without the Somers Tracts and the Sessions Papers; without King and Nicholls’ anecdotes and the lives of Nollekens and Northcote; without a set of the British Essayists, from Addison to Hawkesworth; without the great Grub-street Journal and the Daily Courant; without Gay’s Trivia and Garth’s Dispensary; without Aubrey, Evelyn, and Luttrell’s diaries; without the London Gazette and Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman; without Swift’s Journal to Stella, and Vertue and Faithorne’s maps, and Wilkinson, Strype, Maitland, Malcolm, Gwynn, and the great Crowle Pennant; with plenty of small deer in the way of tracts, broadsides, and selections from the bookstall-keepers’ sweepings and the cheesemongers’ rejected addresses; without these modest materials, how is this humble picture to be painted?
After this little glance behind the scenes of a book-maker’s workshop, you will be wondering, I dare say, as to what was the curious coincidence I spoke of in connection with William Hone’s sojourn in Ship Court, Old Bailey. Simply this. Three years after his Litany escapades, the restless man went tooth and nail into the crapulous controversy between George IV. and his unhappy wife; who, though undoubtedly no better than she should be, was undoubtedly used much worse than she or any other woman, not a Messalina or a Frédégonde, should have been. From Hone’s shop issued those merry, rascally libels against the fat potentate late of Carlton House, and which, under the titles of “The Green Bag,” “Doctor Slop,” the “House that Jack built,” and the like, brought such shame and ridicule upon the vain, gross old man, that all Mr. Theodore Hook’s counter-scurrilities in the high Tory John Bull could not alleviate or wipe away the stains thereof. Ah! it was a nice time—a jocund, Christian time. Reformers calling their king “knave, tyrant, and debauchee;” loyalists screaming “hussey,” and worse names, after their queen. That was in the time of the Consul Unmanlius I should think. Hone’s clever rascalities sold enormously, especially among the aristocracy of the “Opposition.” But Mr. Hone’s disloyal facetiæ from Ship Court were relieved and atoned for by the illustrations, engraved from drawings executed with quite an astonishing power of graphic delineation and acuteness of humour, by a then very young artist named George Cruikshank: a gentleman whose earliest toys, I believe, had been a strip of copper and an etching-needle; who has, since those wild days of ’21, achieved hundreds of successes more brilliant, but not more notorious, than those he won by working for restless Mr. Hone; and whom I am proud to speak of here, with Hogarth’s name at the head of my sheet, now that he, our George, is old, and honoured, and famous. Do I attach too much importance to the works of these twin geniuses, I wonder, because I love the style of art in which they have excelled with a secret craving devotion, and because I have vainly striven to excel in it myself? Am I stilted or turgid when I paraphrase that which Johnson said of Homer and Milton in re the Iliad and the Paradise Lost, and say of Hogarth and Cruikshank that George is not the greatest pictorial humorist our country has seen only because he is not the first? At any rate, you will grant the coincidence—won’t you?—between the lad George Cruikshank and little boy Hogarth, toddling about Ship Court and perchance scrawling caricatures on the walls, exaggerating in rollicking chalk (I allow him as many brick walls as you like, but no slates) the Slawkenbergian nose of William the Deliverer, or adding abnormal curls to the vast wig of the detested clerical statesman, Burnet.
Little boy Hogarth is yet too young to see these things; but he may be at Gilbert Burnet’s turbulent funeral yet. First, we must get him out of the Old Bailey, where he dwells for a good dozen years at least. Dominie Hogarth has the school upstairs, where he drums Lilly’s Accidence, or perhaps his own Grammatical Disputations into his scholars. Of what order may these scholars have been? The gentry had long since left the Bailey; and you may start, perhaps, to be told that British Brahmins had ever inhabited that lowering precinct of the gallows, and parvyse of the press-room. Yet, in the Old Bailey stood Sydney House, a stately mansion built for the Sydneys, Earls of Leicester, and which they abandoned [circa 1660] for the genteeler locality of Leicester Fields. I don’t know what Sydney House could have been like, or by whom it was inhabited when Hogarth was a little boy; but it was to all likelihood in a tumbledown, desolate condition. In Pennant’s time it was a coachmaker’s shop. The keeper of Newgate may have had children, too, for schooling, but his corporation connections would probably have insured his boy’s admission to Christ’s Hospital, or to Paul’s, or Merchant Taylors’ School, for the keeper of Newgate was then a somebody; and it was by times his privilege to entertain the sheriffs with sack and sugar. Dominie Hogarth’s pupils must have been sons of substantial traders in the Bailey itself—where were many noted booksellers’ shops—or from the adjacent Ludgate, whilom Bowyers Hill, and from Fleet Street, or, perchance, Aldersgate Street; which, not then purely commercial or shopkeeping, was the site of many imposing mansions superbly decorated within, formerly the property of the nobility, but then (1697) occupied by stately Turkey and Levant merchants. And to the dominie’s may have come the offspring of the wealthy butchers of Newgate Market, whose rubicund meat-wives are libellously declared to have been in the habit of getting “over-taken by burnt sherry” by eight o’clock in the morning; and while in that jovial but prematurely matutinal condition, rivalling the flat-caps of the Dark House, Billingsgate, and the pease-pottage sellers of Baldwin’s Gardens—to say nothing of the cake and comfit purveyors to the Finsbury archers—in voluble and abusive eloquence. Bonny dames were these butchers’ wives; lusty, rotund, generous to the poor, loud, but cheery with their apprentices and journeymen, great (as now) in making fortunes for their beast-buying-and-killing husbands; radiant in gold-chains, earrings, and laced aprons, and tremendous at trades-feasts and civic junketings.
And I am yet in the year 1697, and in the Old Bailey with a child in my arms. Were this an honest plain-sailing biography, now, what would be easier for me than to skip the first twelve or thirteen years of the boy’s life, assume that he got satisfactorily through his teething, thrush, measles, and chicken-pox perils, and launch him comfortably, a chubby lad, in the midst of the period of which the ruthless Doctor Swift will write a history—the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne—and make up his little bundle for him, ready for his apprenticeship to Mr. Ellis Gamble, silver-plate engraver of Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields. He may have been sent out to nurse at Tottenham or Edmonton, or, may be, distant Ware, as children of his degree were wont to be sent out (Mr. John Locke’s Education, and Mr. Daniel Defoe’s Family Instructor, passim). But, in good sooth, I am loth to turn over my William to the tender mercies of the eighteenth century and the Augustan age. I fear great “Anna” and her era, and for a double reason: first, that people know already so much about the reign of Queen Anne. No kindly book a’ bosom but can follow Sir Roger de Coverley and his tall silent friend the Spectator in their rambles; but has seen Swift walking across the park in mighty fear of the Mohocks; but has taken a dish of coffee at Miss Vanhomrigh’s; but has lounged in the elegant saloon, among the China monsters and the black boys, with Belinda or Sir Plume; but has accompanied Steele from coffee-house to coffee-house, and peeped over his shoulder while he scribbled those charming little billets to his wife; but has seen Queen Anne herself, the “stately lady in black velvet and diamonds,” who touched little Sam Johnson for the evil, and hung round his neck that broad piece of angel gold, which in its more earthly form of a guinea the poor doctor wanted so often and so badly at a subsequent stage of his career. The humorists and essayists of Queen Anne’s days have made them as crystal-clear to us as Grammont and Pepys made those of the Second Charles; and—there! bah! it is mock modesty to blink the truth because my pen happens to be enlisted under such a banner. I could have gone swaggeringly enough into all the minutiæ of Anne’s days, all the glories and meannesses of John Churchill, all the humours, and tyrannies, and quarrels of Pope, and Gay, and Harley, and St. John, if a book called Esmond had never been written. Yet finding myself in this cleft stick, between the historian who wrote of the state of manners at the close of the reign of Charles II., and the novelist, who has made the men and women of Queen Anne’s court and city and army live again, I feel slightly relieved. There is just one little niche left for me. Just three years to dwell upon, while little boy Hogarth is in his swaddling clothes, or is consorting with divers other little brats as diminutive as he, on the doorsteps or the pavement of Ship Court. Three years,—’97, ’98, ’99. Ah! laissez-moi pleurer ces années mortes. Let me linger over these three ignored years. They were a transition time. They are lost in the deeper shadow cast by the vicious bonfire that Charles’s roués and beauties lighted up—a shadow shortly to be dispelled by the purer radiance of an Augustan era of literature. Pepys and Evelyn are so minute, so lifelike, that between their word-paintings, and those of the Spectator and Tatler, there seems a great black blank.
No seven-league boots are necessary for me to stride back to my subject, and to the time when my little-boy-hero is forming his earliest acquaintance with the Old Bailey stones. I said that I wanted those last three dying years of the seventeenth century. Let me take them, and endeavour to make the best of them, even when I compress some of their characteristics within the compass of a single London day.
The century, then, is on its last legs. The town seems to have quite done with the Stuarts, socially speaking, although politically another Stuart will reign: a dethroned Stuart is actually at St. Germains, maundering with his confessors, and conspiring with his shabby refugee courtiers; thinking half of assassinating the abhorred Dutchman, and making Père la Chaise Archbishop of Canterbury in partibus, and half of slinking away to La Trappe, wearing a hair shirt, and doing grave-digging on his own account for good and all. Politically, too, this crooked-wayed, impracticable Stuart’s son and grandson will give the world some trouble till the year 1788, when, a hundred years after the Revolution, a worn-out, blasé sensualist, called the Young Pretender, dies at Rome, leaving a brother, the Cardinal of York, who survived to be a pensioner of George the Third, and bequeathed to him those Stuart papers, which, had their contents been known at the Cockpit, Westminster, half a century before, would have caused the fall of many a head as noble as Derwentwater’s, as chivalrous as Charles Ratcliffe’s, and broken many a heart as loving and true as Flora Macdonald’s or Lady Nithisdale’s. But with the Restoration-Stuart period, London town has quite done. Rochester has died penitent, Buckingham bankrupt and forlorn. Archbishop Tenison has preached Nelly Gwynn’s funeral sermon; Portsmouth, Davies, are no more heard of; Will Chiffinch can procure for kings no more: the rigid Dutchman scorns such painted children of dirt; Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland, has married one Fielding, a swindling caricature of a “beau;” Wycherly is old and broken, and the iron of the Fleet has entered into his soul; and poor noble old John Dryden, twitted as a renegade, neglected, unpensioned, and maligned, is savagely writing the finest “copy” that has issued yet from that grand fertile brain, writing it with a Spartan fortitude and persistence, and ever and anon giving left-legged Jacob Tonson a sound verbal trouncing, when the publisher would palm on the poet clipped moidores for milled Jacobuses. Ah, little boy Hogarth, you will see Johnson fifty years hence, listen to him behind the curtain in the twilight room, as the Jacobite schoolman raves against the cruelty of government in hanging Doctor Cameron; but you will never behold John Dryden in the flesh, little boy, or hear him at Wills’s on golden summer afternoons, the undisputed oracle of wits, and critics, and poets. The horrible Chancellor Jeffries (however could the ruffian have found patience and temper to deliver a decree in Chancery!) is dead, but he has a son alive, a rake-hell, Mohock Lord Jeffries, who, four years hence, will be implicated in a scandalous disturbance at Dryden’s house, in Gerrard Street; the poet’s corpse lying there. There are brave men hard at work for the nineteenth century. Isaac Newton is working; in ’95 he was appointed Master of the Mint. Pope is beginning to feel his poetic feet. Mr. Joseph Addison is at college. Swift has had the run of Temple’s library. Lely has thrown down the pencil; Knelier has taken it up; and James Thornhill is preparing for vast sprawlings on ceilings, after the model of Verrio and Laguerre.
Away with Restoration reminiscences, for the more decent century that is to come. By 8th and 9th William III., Alsatia is ruined, and its privileges of sanctuary wholly taken away. A dreadful outpouring and scattering of ragged rogues and ruffians, crying out in what huff-cap cant and crambo they can command, that delenda est Carthago, takes place. Foul reeking taverns disgorge knavish tatterdemalions, soddened with usquebaugh and spiced Hollands, querulous or lachrymose with potations of “mad dog,” “angel’s food,” “dragon’s milk,” and “go-by-the-wall.” Stern catchpoles seize these inebriated and indebted maltbugs, and drag them off to the Compters, or to Ludgate, “where citizens lie in durance, surrounded by copies of their freedom.” Alewives accustomed to mix beer with rosin and salt deplore the loss of their best customers; for their creed was Pistol’s advice to Dame Quickly, “Trust none;” and the debased vagabonds who crowded the drinking-shops—if they drank till they were as red as cocks and little wiser than their combs, if they occasionally cut one another’s throats in front of the bar, or stabbed the drawer for refusing to deliver strong waters without cash—could sometimes borrow, and sometimes beg, and sometimes steal money, and then they drank and paid. No use was there in passing bad money in Alsatia, when every sanctuary man and woman knew how to coin and to clip it. You couldn’t run away from your lodgings in Alsatia, for so soon as you showed your nose at the Whitefriars’ gate, in Fleet Street, the Philistines were upon you. Oh! for the ruffianly soldados, the copper captains, the curl’d-pate braggarts, the poltroons who had lost their ears in the pillory, and swore they had been carried off by the wind of a cannon-shot at Sedgemoor! Oh! for the beauteous slatterns, the Phrynes and Aspasias of this Fleet Street Athens, with their paint and their black visor masques; their organ-pipe head-dresses, their low stomachers, and their high-heeled shoes; the tresses of dead men’s hair they thatched their poor bald crowns withal; the live fools’ rings and necklaces they sported between taking out and pawning in! Beggars, cut-purses, swindlers, tavern-bilks, broken life-guardsmen, foreign counts, native highwaymen, and some poor honest unfortunates, the victims of a Draconic law of debtor and creditor, all found their Patmos turn out to be a mere shifting quicksand. The town does not long remain troubled with these broken spars and timbers of the wrecked ship—once a tall caravel—Humanity. Don’t you remember when the “Holy Land” of St. Giles’s was pulled down to build New Oxford Street, what an outcry arose as to where the dispossessed Gilesians were to find shelter? and don’t you remember how quickly they found congenial holes and corners into which to subside—dirt to dirt, disease to disease, squalor to squalor, rags to rags? So with the Alsatians. A miserable compensation is made to them for their lost sanctuary by the statute which quashes all foregone executions for debts under fifty pounds; but they soon get arrested again—often for sums not much more than fifty pence—and, being laid up in hold, starve and rot miserably. There are debtors in Newgate, there are debtors in Ludgate; in the Clink, the Borough, Poultry, and Wood Street Compters, the Marshalsea, the King’s Bench, and at Westminster Gate houses, besides innumerable spunging houses, or “spider’s webs,” with signs like inns, such as the “Pied Bull” in the Borough, and the “Angel” in Cursitor Street. Little boy Hogarth will have much to observe about prisons and prisoners when he is grown to be a man. Many Alsatians take refuge in the Southwark Mint, likewise, and by the same statute deprived of its sanctuary; but which, in some underhand manner—perhaps from there being only one bridge into Southwark, and that rotten—contrives to evade it till late in the reign of George I. Coining flourishes thenceforth more than ever in the Mint; the science of Water Lane being added to the experience of St. Mary Overy, and both being aided, perhaps, by the ancient numismatic traditions of the place. More of the Alsatians are caught up by alguazils of the criminal law, and, after a brief sojourn at Newgate, “patibulate” at Justice Hall, and eventually make that sad journey up Holborn Hill in a cart, stopping for a refresher at the Bowl House, St. Giles’s Pound—alas! it is not always staying for his liquor that will save the saddler of Bawtree from hanging—and so end at Tyburn. Some, too, go a-begging in Lincoln’s Inn, and manufacture some highly remunerative mutilations and ulcers. And some, a very few, tired of the draff and husks in Alsatia, go back to their fathers, and are forgiven. In this hard world, whose members only see the application of parables that teach us love and mercy on Sundays, it is easier to find prodigals to repent than fathers to forgive. But for our hope and comfort, that parable has another and a higher meaning.
Alsatia was linked hand in glove with the Court of the Restoration. ’Twas often but a chapel of ease to the backstairs of Whitehall, and many a great courtier, ruined at basset with the king and his beauties the night before, found his level on the morrow in this vile slum-playing butt, playing cards on a broken pair of bellows. But now, 1697, Whitehall itself is gone. The major part of the enormous pile went by fire in ’91; now the rest, or all but Holbein’s Gate, and the blood-stained Banqueting-house, has fallen a prey to the “devouring element.”
Whitehall, then, has gone by the board. In vain now to look for Horn Chamber, or Cabinet Room, or the stone gallery that flanked Privy Garden, where the imperious, depraved Louise de la Quérouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth, lived amid “French tapestry, Japan cabinets, screens, pendule clocks, great vases of wrought plate, table stands, chimney furniture, sconces, branches, braseners, all of massive silver, and out of number.” All these things, worthy Master Evelyn, of Sayes Court, Deptford (who about this time has let his said mansion and ground to Peter Velikè, czar of Muscovy, and thinks him but an evil tenant, with his uncouth, uncleanly Russian fashions, his driving of wheelbarrows through neatly-trimmed hedges, and spitting over polished andirons, and gorging himself with raw turnips sliced in brandy)—worthy, sententious Evelyn shall see these things no more. Nay, nor that “glorious gallery,” quoted from his description innumerable times, where was the dissolute king “sitting toying with his concubines, Portsmouth, Cleveland, and Mazarine, &c.; a French boy singing love-songs, whilst about twenty of the great courtiers and others were at basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2,000l. in gold before them. Six days after, all was in the dust.” And worse.
Little boy Hogarth, you shall often pass by the banqueting-house—ay, and admire Hans Holbein’s wondrous gate of red brick, tesselated in quaint and beauteous design; of which the fragments, when the gate was pulled down in 1760, were begged by William, Duke of Cumberland, and the pieces numbered, with the project of having them transferred to Windsor park and there re-erected as a royal ducal lodge. But the project was never carried out, and the duke probably forgot all about it, or found something more worth begging for than a lot of old building materials. So exit Whitehall palace: buttery, bakehouse, wood and coal yards, spicery, charcoal-house, king’s privy cellar, council chamber, hearth-money office, and other fripperies in stone. It must have been a grand place, even as the heterogeneous pile that existed in William Dutchman’s time; but if James or Charles had possessed the funds to rebuild it according to Inigo Jones’s magnificent plan, of which the banqueting-house is but an instalment, the palace of Whitehall would have put to the blush the Baths of Diocletian, the golden house of Nero—yea, and the temple which Erostratus burnt, to prove that all things were vanity, even to incendiarism.
Will it please you to walk into the city, now that we have done with Westminster, any day in these three years of the moribund seventeenth century. London is busy enough, noisy enough, dirty enough; but not so smoky. There is little or no foot pavement; but there are plenty of posts and plenty of kennels—three hundred and eleven, I think, between Newgate and Charing Cross. When the humorous operation, resorted to with ugly frequency about this time, of whipping a man at the cart’s tail, takes place, the hangman gives the poor wretch a lash at every kennel the near wheel of the cart grates against. Newgate to Ludgate, Charing Cross to the “Cockpit” at Westminster, are considered the mildest pilgrimages to be undergone by these poor flagellated knaves; but Charing to Newgate is the real via dolorosa of stripes. That pilgrimage was reserved for the great objects of political hatred and vengeance in James II.’s reign—for Titus Oates and Thomas Dangerfield. The former abominable liar and perjurer, stripped of his ambrosial periwig and rustling silk canonicals, turned out of his lodgings in Whitehall, and reduced to the very last of the last, is tried and sentenced, and is very nearly scourged to death. He is to pay an enormous fine besides, and is to lie in Newgate for the remainder of his life. I wonder that like “flagrant Tutchin,” when shuddering under a sentence almost as frightful, he did not petition to be hanged: yet there seems to be an indomitable bull-headed, bull-backed power of endurance about this man Oates—this sham doctor of divinity, this Judas spy of Douai and St. Omer, this broken chaplain of a man-of-war, this living, breathing, incarnate Lie—that enables him to undergo his punishment, and to get over its effects somehow. He has not lain long in Newgate, getting his seared back healed as best he may, when haply, in “pudding-time,” comes Dutch William the Deliverer. Oates’s scourging was evidently alluded to when provision was made in the Bill of Rights against “cruel and unusual punishments.” The heavy doors of Newgate open wide for Titus, who once more dons his wig and canonicals. Reflective persons do not believe in the perjured scoundrel any more, and he is seldom sworn, I should opine, of the common jury or the crowner’s quest. He has “taken the book in his right hand,” and kissed it once too often. By a section of the serious world, who yet place implicit faith in all Sir Edmondbury Godfrey’s wounds, and take the inscription on the Monument of Fish Street Hill as law and gospel, Titus Oates is regarded as a species of Protestant martyr—of a sorry, slippery kind, may be, but, at all events, as one who has suffered sorely for the good cause. The government repension him; he grows fat and bloated, and if Tom Brown is to be believed (Miscellanies, 1697), Doctor Oates, about the time of Hogarth’s birth, marries a rich city widow of Jewin Street.
Different, and not so prosperous, is the end of the assistant villain, Dangerfield. He, too, is whipped nearly out of his skin, and within a tattered inch of his miserable life; but his sentence ends before Newgate is reached, and he is being taken to that prison in a hackney-coach, when the hangman’s assistants stop the vehicle at the Gray’s Inn Coffee-house, to give the poor, tired, mangled wretch a drink. Steps out of the coffee-house one Mr. Francis, a counsel learned in the law of Gray’s Inn aforesaid, and who has probably been taking a flask too much at the coffee-house. He is an ardent anti-plot man, and in a railing tone and Newmarket phrase asks Dangerfield whether he has “run his heat and how he likes it.” The bleeding object in the coach, revived to pristine ruffianism by the liquor his gaolers have given him, answers with a flood of ribald execrations—bad language could surely be tolerated in one so evilly intreated as he had been that morning—whereupon the barrister in a rage makes a lunge at Dangerfield’s face, with a bamboo cane, and strikes one of his eyes out. In the fevered state of the man’s blood, erysipelas sets in, and Dangerfield shortly afterwards gives the world a good riddance (though it were better the hangman had done it outright with a halter) and dies. The most curious thing is, that Francis was tried and executed at Tyburn for the murder of this wretched, scourged, blinded perjurer. He was most likely tried by a strong Protestant jury, who (very justly) found him guilty on the facts, but would very probably have found him guilty against the facts, to show their Protestant feeling and belief in the Popish plot; but I say the thing is curious, seeing that the Crown did not exercise its prerogative of mercy and pardon to Francis, who was a gentleman of good family, and manifestly of the court way of thinking. The conclusion is: either that there was more impartial justice in the reign of James II. than we have given that bad time credit for, or that the court let Francis swing through fear of the mob. You see that the mob in those days did not like to be baulked of a show, and that the mob derived equal pleasure from seeing Francis hanged as from seeing Dangerfield whipped. The moral of this apologue is, that Oates and Dangerfield being very much alike in roguery, especially Oates, one got not quite so much as he deserved, and the other not quite enough; which has been the case in many other instances that have occurred in society, both vulgar and polite, since the days of William III.
There, I land you at Temple Bar, on whose gory spikes are the heads of the last conspirators against William the Dutchman’s life. “Forsitan et nobis,” whispered Goldsmith slyly to Johnson as they gazed up at the heads which, late in the reign of George III., yet rotted on those fatal spikes. We will not linger at Temple Bar now. Little boy Hogarth, years hence, will take us backwards and forwards through it hundreds of times. The three last years of century seventeen glide away from me. Plumed hats, ye are henceforth to be cocked. Swords, ye shall be worn diagonally, not horizontally. Puffed sleeves, ye must give place to ruffles. Knickerbocker breeches, with rosettes at the knees, ye must be superseded by smalls and rolled stockings. Shoe-bows, the era of buckles is coming. Justaucorps, flapped waistcoats will drive you from the field. Falling bands, your rivals are to be cravats of Mechlin lace. Carlovingian periwigs, the Ramillies’ wig is imminent. Elkanah Settles, greater city poets are to sing the praise of city custards. Claude du Val and Colonel Jack, greater thieves will swing in the greater reign that is to come. And wake up, little boy Hogarth, for William the Dutchman has broken his collar-bone, and lies sick to death at Kensington. The seventeenth century is gone and passed. In 1703 William dies, and the Princess of Denmark reigns in his stead. Up, little boy Hogarth! grow stout and tall—you have to be bound ’prentice and learn the mystery of the cross-hatch and the double cypher. Up, baby Hogarth, there is glorious work for you to do!