V.—Between London and Sheerness.

As one, Reader, who concludes haply, through hearsay, that his uncle William has left him a ten pound legacy; but, going afterwards to Doctors’ Commons, paying his shilling, and reading that said uncle’s will,—receiving letters from stately lawyers, full of congratulation, at seventy pence a piece,—being bowed and kotoued to by people who were wont to cut him, and overwhelmed with offers of unlimited credit by tradesfolk who yesterday would not trust to the extent of a pair of woollen hose—discovers that he has inherited a fine fortune; so may an author scarcely help feeling who has commenced a modest little series of papers in the hope that they would fill a gap and serve a turn, and who finds himself, now, roaming through a vast country, inexhaustible in fertility, undermined with treasure, and overstocked with game: of all which he is expected to give a faithful and accurate report. Yes, the world Hogarthian is all before me, where to choose. Facilities for “opening up” the teeming territory present themselves on every side. Authorities accumulate; microscopes and retrospective spy-glasses are obligingly lent. The Chamberlain of London politely throws open his archives. I am permitted to inspect a Hogarth-engraved silver-plate, forming part of the paraphernalia of the famous past-Overseer’s box of St. Margaret’s, Westminster. Father Prout sends me from Paris an old Hogarth etching he has picked up on the Quai Voltaire, and, withal, more humour and learning in a sheet of letter-paper than ever I shall have in my head in a lifetime. A large-minded correspondent in Cheshire insists on tearing a portrait and biography of W. H. from an old book in his possession, and sending the fragments to me. From the blue shadows of the Westmoreland Fells comes, by book-post, a copy of “Aid Hoggart’s” poems. A friend promises to make interest with the authorities of the Painters’ Company for any Hogarthian memorabilia their records may contain. Another friend advises that I should straightway memorialise the Benchers of the Honourable Society of Lincolns’ Inn, for information relative to W. H’s entertainment by the “Sages de la Ley,” A.D. 1750. I am bidden to remember that I should visit the Foundling Hospital, to see the March to Finchley; that there are original Hogarths in Sir John Soane’s Museum, and in the church of St. Mary Redclyffe, Bristol.[9] And, upon my word, I have a collection of correspondence about Hogarth that reads like an excerpt from the Clergy List. Their reverences could not be more prolific of pen and ink were I a heterodox Bampton Lecturer. How many times I have been clerically reminded of a blunder I committed (in No. I.) in assigning a wrong county as the locality of St. Bee’s College. How many times I have been enlightened as to the derivation of the hangman’s appellation of Jack Ketch. From rectories, parsonages, endowed grammar schools, such corrections, such explanations, have flowed in amain. Not to satiety, not to nausea, on the part of their recipient. To him it is very good and pleasant to think that some familiar words on an old English theme can interest cultivated and thoughtful men. It is doubly pleasant to be convinced that he was not in error when, in the first section of these essays, he alluded to the favour with which William Hogarth had ever been held by the clergy of the Church of England.

Yes, I have come into a fine fortune, and the balance at the banker’s is prodigious. But how if the cheque book be lost? if the pen sputter, if the ink turn pale and washy, or thick and muddy? Alnaschar! it is possible to kick over that basket full of vitreous ware. Rash youth of Siamese extraction, it may have pleased your imperial master to present you with a white elephant. Woe! for the tons of rice and sugar that the huge creature consumes, the sweet and fresh young greenstuff for which he unceasingly craves;—and you but a poor day labourer? You must have elephants, must you? Better to have gone about with a white mouse and a hurdy-gurdy: the charitable might have flung you coppers. Shallow, inept, and pretentious, to what a task have you not committed yourself! Thus to me have many sincere friends—mostly anonymous—hinted. These are the wholesome raps on the knuckles a man gets who attempts without being able to accomplish; who inherits, and lacks the capacity to administer. Many a fine fortune is accompanied by as fine a lawsuit—remember the legatee cobbler in Pickwick—and dire is the case of the imprudent wight who finds himself some fine morning in contempt, with Aristarchus for a Lord Chancellor! But I have begun a journey. The descent of Avernus is as facile as sliding down a Montagne Russe;—sed revocare gradum:—no, one mustn’t revoke, nor in the game of life, nor in the game of whist. We will go on, if you please; and I am your very humble servant to command.

The stir made by the publication of the set of engravings from the six pictures of the Harlot’s Progress was tremendous. Twelve hundred copies of the first impression were sold. Miniature copies of some of the scenes were engraved on fan-mounts. Even, as occurred with George Cruikshank’s Bottle, the story was dramatised, and an interlude called The Jew Decoyed; or, a Harlot’s Progress, had a most successful “run.” It is worthy of observation that the perverse and depraved taste of the town took it as rather a humorous thing that the courtezan, splendidly kept by a Hebrew money-lender, should decoy and betray her keeper. The Jew Decoyed. Ho! ho! it was a thing to laugh at. Who sympathizes with M. Géronte in the farce—the poor, feeble, old dotard—when Arlechino runs off with his daughter, and Pierrot the gracioso half cuts his nose off while he is shaving him, picking his pocket, and treading on his tenderest corns, meanwhile? The tradesmen and lodging-house keepers who are swindled and robbed by clown and pantaloon in the pantomime; the image boys, fishmongers, and greengrocers whose stock in trade is flung about the stage; the peaceable watchmaker, who tumbles over on the slide artfully prepared in front of his own door with fresh butter, by the miscreant clown; the grenadier bonneted with his own Busby; the young lady bereft of her bustle; the mother of the baby that is sate upon, swung round by the legs, and crammed into a letter-box: is any pity evoked for those innocent and ill-used persons? I am afraid there is none. I have seen a policeman in the pit roaring with laughter at the pummelling and jostling his simulated brother receives on the stage. It is remarkable to watch the keen delight with which exhibitions of petty cruelty and petty dishonesty, of a gay, lively description, are often regarded. I can understand the pickpocket detected by Charles the Second’s keen eye in annexing a snuff-box at court, laying his finger by the side of his nose, and taking the monarch into his confidence. I can understand cynic Charles keeping the rogue’s secret for the humour of the thing. And, verily, when I see children torturing animals, and senseless louts grinning and jeering, and yelling “Who shot the dog!” after a gentleman in the street, because he happens to wear the honourable uniform of a volunteer, and persons who are utter strangers to one belated runaway joining in the enlivening shout and chase of “Stop thief!” I can begin to understand the wicked wisdom of the American Diogenes who coolly indited this maxim: “If you see a drowning man, throw a rail at him.”

Hogarth’s engravings of the adventures of Kate Hackabout were extensively and grossly pirated. In those days, as in these, there were pictorial Curlls in the land. The author of the foregoing has had the honour to see some early and trifling pictorial performances of his own pirated upon pocket-handkerchiefs and shirt-fronts; but, dear me, what a legal pother would have arisen at Manchester if any one had pirated those beautiful patent cylinders on which the piracies must have been so neatly engraved! Some vile imitations of Hackabout were even cut on wood; and I should dearly like to know if any impressions of those blocks are extant. Mr. Ottley hits none in his History of Chalcography; but a series of woodcuts so long after Albert Durer and Maso Fineguerra, so long before Bewick the revivalist’s time, would be deeply interesting.[10] Hogarth smarted under this injury, as well he might. The artist had always a strong admixture of the British tradesman in his composition, and, as was his wont when injured, he bellowed lustily. He moved the Lords of the Treasury. He moved the Houses of Lords and Commons; and, at last (1735), he obtained an Act of Parliament, specially protecting his copyright in his prints. As usual, too, he celebrated the victory with a loud and jubilant cock-crow, and complimented Parliament on their recognition of the principles of truth and right, in an allegorical etching, with a flowery inscription. It is good to learn that the Legislature were tender to this artist even after his death, and that his widow, Jane Hogarth, obtained, by another special act, a renewal of his copyrights for her sole use and benefit. In this age of photography and electro-printing, do we not need a law of artistic copyright somewhat more definite and more stringent than the loose statutes that lawyers quibble about and interpret different ways?

Ere I quit the subject of the Harlot’s Progress, it is meet to advert to a little dictum of good Mr. Fuseli, the ambidextrous Anglo-Swiss, who painted the Lazar-house and other horrifying subjects, who used to swear so dreadfully at the clerks in Coutt’s banking-house, and who called for his umbrella when he went to see Mr. Constable’s showery pictures. “The characteristic discrimination and humorous exuberance,” says Fuseli, in a lecture, “which we admire in Hogarth, but which, like the fleeting passion of a day, every hour contributes something to obliterate, will soon be unintelligible by time or degenerate into caricature: the chronicle of scandal, and the history book of the vulgar.” I have the highest respect for the learning and acumen of Fuseli; but I think he is wholly wrong in assuming that Hogarth’s humour or discrimination will ever become “unintelligible by time,” or will “degenerate into caricature.” Look at this Harlot’s Progress. Who cares to know, now, that Charteris continues to rot; that he was guilty of every vice but prodigality and hypocrisy—being a monster of avarice and a paragon of impudence; that he was condemned to death for a dreadful crime, and only escaped the halter by the interest of aristocratic friends; that he was a liar, a cheat, a gambler, a usurer, and a profligate; that he amassed an estate of ten thousand a year; that he was accused while living, and that the populace almost tore his body from his remote grave in Scotland? Who cares to know how many times Mother Needham was carted—although you may be sure they were not half so frequent as she deserved. Is it important to know exactly whether the Caucasian financier was intended for Sir Henry Furnese, or for Rafael Mendez, or Israel Vanderplank. The quack Misaubin[11] and his opponent are forgotten. Stern Sir John Gonson[12] and his anti-Cyprian crusades are forgotten. For aught we can tell, the Bridewell gaoler, the Irish servant, the thievish harridan, the Fleet parson, the glowering undertaker, may all be faithful portraits of real personages long since gone to dust. It boots little even to know if Kate were really Kate or Mary Hackabout, or Laïs, or Phryne, or Doll Common. She is dead, and will sin and suffer stripes no more. But the humour and discrimination of the painter yet live, the types he pourtrayed endure to this hour. I saw Charteris the day before yesterday, tottering about in shiny boots beneath the Haymarket Colonnade. The quacks live and prosper, drive mail-phætons, and enter horses for the Derby. The Jew financier calls himself Mr. Montmorenci de Levyson, and lends money at sixty per cent., or as Julius McHabeas, Gent., one of her Majesty’s attorneys-at-law, issues a writ at the suit of his friend and father-in-law Levyson. And Kate decoys and cozens the financier every day in a cottage ornée at Brompton or St. John’s Wood. Kate! there is her “miniature brougham” gliding through Albert Gate. There is her barouche on the hill at Epsom. There she is at the play, or in the garden, flaunting among the coloured lamps. There she is in the Haymarket, in the Strand, in the New Cut, in the workhouse, in the police cell, in the hospital. There she is on Waterloo Bridge, and there—God help her!—in the cold, black river, having accomplished her “progress.” Take away the whipping-post from Bridewell; and for the boudoir paid for by the Jew, substitute the garish little sitting-room that Mr. Holman Hunt painted in his wonderful picture of the Awakened Conscience, and one can realize the “humour” and “discrimination” of Hogarth in a tale as sad that progresses around us every day.

Every one who has the most superficial acquaintance with a Hogarthian biography has heard the story of how Mrs. Hogarth, or her mamma, Dame Alice Thornhill, placed the six pictures of the Harlot’s Progress in Sir James’s breakfast-parlour one morning, ready for the knight on his coming down. “Very well, very well,” cried the king’s sergeant painter, rubbing his hands, and well nigh pacified: “the man who can paint like this wants no dowry with my daughter.” I am glad to believe the story; but I don’t believe, as some malevolent commentators have insinuated, that Sir James Thornhill made his son-in-law’s talent an excuse for behaving parsimoniously to the young couple after he had forgiven them. There is nothing to prove that Sir James Thornhill was a stingy man. He had a son who was a great crony of Hogarth, accompanied him on the famous journey to Rochester and Sheerness, and afterwards became sergeant-painter to the navy. I fancy that he was a wild young man, and cost his father large sums. It is certain, however, that Sir James frequently and generously assisted his daughter and son-in-law. He set them up in their house in Leicester Fields; and he appears to have left Hogarth a considerable interest in his house at 104, St. Martin’s Lane, whither he had removed from Covent Garden, and the staircase of which he had painted, according to his incorrigible custom, with “allegories.” The great artists of those days used to employ one another to paint the walls and ceilings of each other’s rooms. Thus Kneller gave commissions to the elder Laguerre, and Thornhill himself employed Robert Brown, the painter who was so famous for “crimson curtains,” and who justified having painted two signs for the Paul’s Head Tavern, in Cateaton Street, on the ground that Correggio had painted the sign of the “Muleteer.” Be it mentioned likewise, to Thornhill’s honour, that he fruitlessly endeavoured to persuade Lord Halifax to found a Royal Academy in the King’s Mews, Charing Cross. It would be better, perhaps, in this place to make an end of goodman Thornhill. Besides Worlidge’s portrait, there is one by Hogarth, in oil, of which a vigorous etching was executed by Samuel Ireland. The portrait was purchased of Mrs. Hogarth, in 1781, and was deemed by her an excellent likeness. Thornhill died at his seat, “Thornhill,” near Weymouth, in 1734.[13] He had transferred his academy or drawing-school, call it what you will, from Covent Garden to St. Martin’s Lane; and to Hogarth he bequeathed all his casts and bustos, all his easels and drawing-stools, all the paraphernalia of his studio. These William ultimately presented to the academy held in St. Peter’s Court St. Martin’s Lane, in premises that had formerly been the studio of Roubiliac the sculptor.

I told you that at about the time of his marriage our artist took summer lodgings at Vauxhall, and first made the acquaintance of Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the “enterprizing” lessee of the once famous “Royal Property.” With Tyers he ever maintained a fast friendship, and he materially and generously assisted him in the decoration of the gardens; for, frugal tradesman as Hogarth was, and sturdily determined to have the rights he had bargained for, he was continually giving away something. We have noticed his donation to the Petro-Roubiliac Academy; to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, of which he was a governor, he gave the picture of the Pool of Bethesda; and the governors of the Foundling Hospital know how nobly munificent was this honest Christian man to the nascent charity. He gave them handsome pictures; he gave them a large proportion in the shares of other picture-auctions—shares as good as money: he painted a splendid portrait of Thomas Coram, the grand old sea-captain, who spent his fortune in cherishing deserted children, and in his old age was not ashamed to confess that he had spent his all in doing good; that his fortune was funded in Heaven—let us trust he is drawing his dividends now; and that here below he was destitute.[14] His example incited many more notable artists to contribute pictures to the charity: and the halls of the Foundling became the chief art-lounge in London. The Royal Academy Exhibition, even, with its annual revenue of infinite shillings, sprang from this odd germ. The Foundling Hospital, I have heard, has wandered from its original purpose; and few of its first attributes are now recognizable in its constitution; but I hope they still teach every little boy and girl foundling to murmur a prayer for Thomas Coram and William Hogarth.

For the embellishment of the supper-boxes at Vauxhall, William made several designs; but there is not much evidence to prove that he painted any of them with his own hand. The paintings were mostly executed by Hogarth’s fast friend, Frank Hayman, and perhaps by Lanscroon, singer and scene-painter, son of old Lanscroon, Riario’s condisciple with Laguerre’s son-in-law Tijou, and the author of a meritorious set of prints illustrating Hob at the Well. For Vauxhall, Hogarth made the designs of the Four Parts of the Day, which he afterwards himself engraved, and which had great success.

Most of us have seen a very ugly, tasteless mezzotinto engraving representing Henry VIII. in an impossible attitude, leering at a coarse Anne Boleyn. I am always sorry to see the words “Hogarth, pinxit,” in the left-hand corner of this inelegant performance, and sorrier to know that he did indeed achieve that daub; and that the picture was hung in the “old great room at the right hand of entry into the gardens.” Indeed it is a barbarous thing. The background is, I suppose, intended to represent an apartment in Cardinal Wolsey’s sumptuous mansion at York Place; but it would do better for a chamber at the “Rose,” or at the “Three Tuns,” in Chandos Street. I can speak of it no more with patience. Why paint it, William? Yet it had all the honours of the mezzotint scraper; it is engraved likewise in line; and Allan Ramsay—“Gentle Shepherd” Ramsay—who should have known better, wrote some eulogistic verses by way of epigraph. Nor did Jonathan Tyers of Vauxhall look the gift horse in the mouth. He was glad to hang the sorry canvas in his old great room; and in testimony of many kindnesses received from the painter, who had “summer lodgings at South Lambeth,” presented him with a perpetual ticket of admission to the gardens for himself and friends. Fancy being on the free-list of Vauxhall for ever! The ticket was of gold, and bore this inscription:—

In perpetuam beneficii memoriam.

Hogarth was a frequent visitor at the “Spring Gardens,” Vauxhall. There, I will be bound, he and his pretty young wife frequently indulged in that cool summer evening’s stroll which the French call prendre le frais. There he may have had many a bowl of arrack punch with Harry Fielding—he was to live to be firm friends with the tremendous author of “Tom Jones;” there I think he may have met a certain Ferdinand Count Fathom, and a Somersetshire gentleman of a good estate but an indifferent temper and conversation, by name Western, together with my Lady Bellaston (in a mask and a cramoisy grogram sack, laced with silver), and, once in a way, perhaps, Mr. Abraham Adams, clerk. There is an authentic anecdote, too, of Hogarth standing one evening at Vauxhall listening to the band, and of a countryman pointing to the roll of paper with which the conductor was beating time, and asking what musical instrument “that white thing was?” “Friend,” answered William, “it is a single handed drum”—not a very bright joke, certainly; but then, as has been pertinently observed, a quibble can be excused to Hogarth, if a conundrum can be pardoned to Swift.

We would paint our pictures and our progresses in 1730-1-2-3. We were gaining fame. The Lords of the Treasury, as related by old under-Secretary Christopher Tilson, could examine and laugh over our plates even at the august council board, in the cockpit, and, adjourning, forthwith proceed to purchase impressions at Bakewell’s shop, near Johnson’s Court, in Fleet Street. “Frances Lady Byron”—more of her lord hereafter—was sitting to us for her portrait. Theophilus Cibber had pantomimised us. “Joseph Gay”—the wretched pseudonym of some Grub Street, gutter-blood rag-galloper—had parodied in “creaking couplets” the picture-poem of Kate Hackabout.[15] Vinny Bourne had headed his “hendecasyllables,” ad Gulielmum Hogarth Παραινετικον. Somerville, author of the Chase had dedicated his Hobbinol to us; we were son-in-law to a knight and M.P., but we were not yet quite emancipated from struggles, and hardship and poverty. As yet we were very badly paid, and our small earnings were gnawed away by the villanous pirates soon to succumb to the protective act of Parliament which Huggins was to draw—how strangely and frequently that detested name turns up—and draw not too efficiently on the model of the old literary copyright statute of Queen Anne. Morris had paid us the thirty pounds adjudged for the Element of Earth: but no munificent, eccentric old maid had as yet arisen to gratify us with sixty guineas for a single comic design: Taste in High Life. We were poor, albeit not lowly. The wolf was not exactly at the door. He didn’t howl from morning to night; but, half-tamed, he built himself a kennel in the porch, and snarled sometimes over the threshold. Let it be told again that we, William, were “a punctual paymaster.” So it behoved us to paint as many portraits and conversations as we could get commissions for, and do an occasional stroke of work on copper-plate for the booksellers. Coypel and Vandergucht, both approved high Dutch draughtsmen of the time, shared the patronage of the better class of booksellers with us; but none of us worked for the polecat Edmund Curll.

One of us, however, made a smart onslaught about this time on Edmund Curll’s most rancorous foe, Alexander Pope. Many pages ago I hinted at this attack, as almost the only one that could be traced directly to Hogarth; although many claim to discern little portraits in disparagement of Pope Alexander in the print of the Lottery, in Rich’s Triumphal Entry to Covent Garden (in which a suppositious Pope beneath the piazza is maltreating a copy of the Beggars’ Opera—why? had he not a hand in it?), and in the Characters at Button’s Coffee-house. There can be no mistake, however, about the Pope in the print known as False Taste, or the second Burlington Gate. There is no need that I should trench on the province of Mr. Carruthers, who, in his edition of Pope, has so admirably narrated the ins and outs of the quarrel between the poet and the magnificent Duke of Chandos, further than to express an opinion that the duke had treated the little man of Twickenham with, at least, courtesy; and that Pope’s description of “Timon’s villa,” was at best somewhat lacking in courtesy. Hogarth took the Chandos side in the squabble—the malevolent still hint in deference to Sir James Thornhill and his old grudge against Kent, the Corinthian petticoat man, and protégé of Lord Burlington. In the print you see Pope perched on a scaffolding, and, as he whitewashes Burlington Gate, bespattering the passing coach of the Duke of Chandos. It would have been well for William to have avoided these partisan personalities. They never brought him anything but grief. He should have remembered Vinny Bourne’s allocution—

“Qui mores hominum improbos, ineptos,

Incidis....”

Rogues, and rakes, and misers, and fanatics, and quacks, were his quarry. It was his to scourge the vices of the great; aye, and to laugh at their foibles. He has, indeed, well generalized the mansion and villa building mania in the courtyard perspective of the Marriage à la Mode, but he should have had nothing directly to do with Burlington Gate or with Canons.

The real scope and bent of his genius were to be triumphantly manifested at this very period by his wonderful composition The Modern Midnight Conversation. I don’t think there is a single artistic design extant which exemplifies to the spectator so forcibly and so rapidly the vices of a coarse and sensual epoch. Most of us have seen that grand picture in the Luxembourg at Paris, the Décadence des Romains of Coutuse, with those stern citizens of the old Brutus stamp gazing in moody sorrow on the enervated patricians, crowned with flowers, golden-sandalled, purple-robed, rouged, and perfumed, lapped in feasting and luxury, and the false smiles of meretricious women; listening to dulcet music; sipping the Chian and the Falernian, babbling the scandal of the bath to their freedmen, or lisping sophisms in emasculated Greek to their hireling philosophers. One has but to glance at that picture to know that the empire is in a bad way; that certain Germanic barbarians are sharpening short swords or whittling clubs into shape far away, and that the Roman greatness is in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I remember once seeing in an old curiosity shop of the Rue Lafitte a water-colour drawing, probably limned by some rapin for some Sophie Arnould of the quarter, and sold at one of her periodical boudoir-and-alcove auctions—a drawing almost as eloquent and as suggestive as the Décadence. A group of ragged little boys, in the peasant costume of Louis the Well-Beloved’s time, have lifted up a heavy curtain. You see, beyond, the interior of a petite maison. Farmers general, marquises, abbés, are junketing with the Sophie Arnoulds of the epoch. The uplifted table-cloth shows the keys of a harpsichord beneath, on which one of the fair dames is tinkling. There are no servants to disturb the company; the dainty dishes rise through noiseless traps. Artificial flowers, champagne, wax candles, Sèvres china and vermeil plate, diamonds, and embroidery: of all these there is an abundance. Outside, where the little ragged hungry boys are, you see snow and naked trees, and a little dead baby in a dead mother’s arms. A fanciful performance, and too violently strained, perhaps; yet one that tells, undeniably, that the age is going wrong; that this champagne will one day turn red as blood; that these wax candles will light a flame not to be put out, but that will burn the petite maison about the ears of Farmers general, Sophie Arnoulds, and company; that the strumming of yonder harpsichord will be inaudible when the dreadful tocain begins to boom. I need but allude to the Dutch Kermesses of Teniers, and Ostade, and Jan Steen, and the camp-life pictures of Wouvermans and Dick Stoop, for those acquainted with those masters to understand the marvellous and instantaneous concentration of all the low, sordid, brutal passions and pastimes of the epoch; the daily life and sports and duties of the boor who swigs the beer and smokes the pipe; of the vraw, who peels the carrots, swaddles the child, and beats the servant maid with a broomstick; of the ruffian soldier, rubbing down his eternal white horse, braying away with his trumpet, gambling under the tilt of his tent, or brabbling with the baggage-waggon woman, who reclines yonder among her pots and kettles. These things come upon us at once; and we are seized and possessed with the life of the time; but the force and suggestiveness of the works I have named become weak and ambiguous when compared with this Modern Midnight Conversation, this picture paraphrase of the immortal “Prospos des Buveurs” of Francois Rabelais. You see an epoch of dull, brutish, besotted revelry: an epoch when my lord duke was taken home drunk in his sedan from the Rose to his mansion in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields; his chair-men and flambeau-men very probably as drunk as he; and his chaplain and groom of the chambers receiving him with bloodshot eyes and hiccuping speech;—when Jemmy Twitcher lay in the kennel as drunk as my lord duke; only, there was nobody to take him home; when there were four thousand ginshops in London; and a grave publicist issued a broadsheet, giving “two hundred and sixty plain and practical reasons” for the legislative suppression of the trade in “the dreadful liquor called Geneva.” I wish I could persuade the temperance societies that this is in comparison a sober age; and that 130 years ago, not only did wine and punch slay their thousands among the upper classes, but gin and brandy—both of which were horribly cheap—slew their tens of thousands among the populace. Wait till we come to the Hogarthian tableaux of Beer Street and Gin Lane. In this Modern Midnight Conversation, everybody is tipsy. The parson, the doctor, the soldier, the gambler, and the bully—the very drawer himself—are all intoxicated. Few of the company can see out of more than one eye. Pipes are lighted, and go out again for want of sober puffing. Songs are commenced, and the second couplet forgotten. Wigs are pushed awry, or quite fall off. The furniture is overturned; rivulets of punch flow over the table, and on to the puddled ground. Men, losing the reins of reason, not only see, but think double; take their own cracked voices for those of interlocutors; quarrel with themselves; give each other the lie, and vow they will draw upon themselves if they, themselves, say something—they know not what—again. This is the drunkenness that cankered, and bloated, and corrupted Church and State, in the debased reigns of the two first Brunswickers; that sent the king fuddled to Heidegger’s masquerade, and the minister reeling in his blue ribbon to the House, and made tavern roysterers of the young nobles of Britain. When one has had to wade through the minor chronicles of this time, it becomes distressingly easy to recognize the terrible truth of the Modern Midnight Conversation.[16]

Now, although William Hogarth, now in his thirty-fifth year, was passably virtuous, and I have heard no instance of his indulging in any modern conversation at midnight or other times, to the extent of becoming overtaken in strong drinks—there were plenty of cakes and ale in the Hogarthian philosophy. He was a brisk man, liberal and hospitable in his own house, and not averse from moderate conviviality abroad, sometimes partaking of the nature of the hilarious gambols known as “High Jinks.” Brother, we must die. It needs not the digging Trappist to tell us so. It needs not the moralist with “Disce mori!” It needs not the looking-glass that shows us the wrinkled brow and grizzled locks. We must die; and we are gravelled, and worn, and sick, and sorry; and in the night we pray for morning, and in the morning cry out that it were night. But they need not be grim ghosts, those memories of the old pleasant follies and “High Jinks.” They did not all belong to the folly and recklessness of wayward youth. They were jovial and exuberant, and merry and light-hearted; trivial, certainly, and, maybe, undignified as when you, John Kemble, rode the hippopotamus at early dawn among the cabbages in Covent Garden; as when you, grave senator and reverend seignior, danced the Irish jig over the crossed broomsticks; as when you, now stately dowager, then sprightly maid of honour, disguised yourself as a buy-a-broom girl; as when you, grave philosopher, condescended, “on that occasion only,” to lead the donkey that was the Rosinante of a fifth of November “Guy.” But you didn’t do any harm. You didn’t exactly bring your parents’ grey hair with sorrow to the grave when you broke the half-crown’s worth of crockeryware; nor were you ever brought to the pass of biting your mamma’s ear off on the Place de Grève, because she didn’t flay you alive for partaking of apples which you had not precisely acquired according to the “vendors and purchasers” doctrines of wise Lord St. Leonards. I say, that I hope we shall not all be brought to judgment for all the rejoicings of our youth; for the assize would surely be too black, and shuddering Mercy would tear the calendar.

In 1732 there must have been “high jinks” on foot from time to time at the Bedford Coffee House, Covent Garden. Now, where was the Bedford Coffee House? Was it at that Bedford Hotel, under the piazza, so unceremoniously elbowed by that monstrous glasshouse called the “Floral Hall”—the Bedford of which Mrs. Warner is so urbane a hostess? Or was it the “Bedford Head,” in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, a hostelry, where to this day a club of bookworm men meet to lay the dust of ancient lore with frugal libations, and talk about Hogarth, and Fielding, and Johnson, and the brave deeds and the brave men of the days that shall be no more? I confess that I incline to the “Bedford Head,” and that I have purposely avoided taking counsel of London antiquaries more learned than myself on the point, lest I should be undeceived. Moreover, Tothall lived at the corner of Tavistock Court, Tavistock Street, which, as everybody knows, is over against Maiden Lane. It was nearer to Leicester Fields, where Hogarth dwelt, than the Bedford under the piazza, and Hogarth and Tothall, with Thornhill, Forrest, and Scott, were the immortal Five who, on the morning of Saturday, the 27th of May, 1732, set out on a Kentish pilgrimage, of which the aim and end were “High Jinks.”

A word as to the Pilgrims. A famous English writer in some lectures on the “English Humourists,” familiar to us all, has described the pilgrimage as that of a “jolly party of tradesmen engaged at high jinks.” Now with the exception of Tothall, who had been pretty nearly everything, and a woollen draper, among multifarious other callings,[17] the party were all professional men. What Hogarth was, you know. He had come to the days when he could wear his sword and bag. Thornhill was Sir James’s son and heir. He was afterwards sergeant-painter to the navy, and preserved a good estate in the west. Scott was a marine painter, said by Lord Orford to be second only to Vandevelde; and Forrest’s poetic narrative of the Tour, in “Hudibrastic verse,” is so fluent, and often so witty, as to show a capacity and a facility very uncommon in those days among tradesmen. The curiosity is that these five accomplished men should have taken delight in diversions of the plainest and most inelegant kind. As my author quoted above justly remarks, this was indeed a “jolly party of tradesmen,” at least, of merrymakers who behaved as we should expect tradesmen to do; but I suspect that the real London tradesman of the time would have been frightened out of his life at such wild doings; and that these jovial Kentish jinks were engaged in by the five Bedfordians through sheer humorous eccentricity, tinged by that inherent coarseness and love of horseplay of the age, which we discover, not only in such holiday jaunts, but in such almost inconceivable frolics as that of George the Second, the Duke of Montague, with Heidegger at the masquerade; the escapade of Lord Middlesex and his friends of the Calves’ Head Club, and the hideous practical joke played off by Pope on Curll. Educated men seemed to share in those days the yearning of the French actress—the besoin de s’encanailler—the desire to disport themselves in a pigsty, more or less Epicurean; and but for the knowledge of this prevalent low tone in cultivated society it is difficult to realize the fact of Hogarth going back to his lady wife, and Thornhill to the powdered and bewigged grandee, his papa.

Forrest’s narrative of the tour, which began, as I have said, on the twenty-seventh, and finished on the thirty-first of May, is far too elaborate for me to give anything beyond a very brief reflex of it here. I will quote, however, the opening lines:—

“’Twas first of morn on Saturday

The seven and twentieth of May,

When Hogarth, Thornhill, Tothall, Scott,

And Forrest, who this journal wrote,

From Covent Garden took departure,

To see the world by land and water.”

It appears that their hearts were light, and those nether garments, now fallen almost into desuetude, save among grooms, footmen, blackrods, and members of the diplomatic service, were thin. They started, singing after a carouse, during the small hours of the morning, and went down the river to Billingsgate. At the noted “Dark-house” they met the same sort of company as Mr. Edward Ward introduces us to in the London Spy, and Hogarth took a portrait, unfortunately not preserved, of a waterside humorist, known as the “Duke of Puddledock.”

“Of Puddledock a porter grim,

Whose portrait Hogarth in a whim

Presented him in caricature,

He pasted on the cellar door.”

Thence they went to Gravesend in the tilt-boat with a “mackrel gale,” chanting lustily, and regaling on “biscuit, beef, and gin.” At Gravesend they put up at “Mrs. Bramble’s.” They had previously seen at Purfleet three men-of-war, the Dursley Galley, the Gibraltar, and the Tartar Pink, the pilot of which last vessel begged them to “lend him a cast.” Thence they walked to Rochester, and saw in the cathedral “th’ unknown person’s monument.” Pendente lite, they drank six pots of ale. They saw “Watt’s Charity,” and eulogized its hospitality, remarking only

“But the contagiously affected,

And rogues and proctors are rejected,”

marvelling much as to the origin of the distaste conceived by Master Watts against “proctors.” For dinner at the Crown at Strood they had “soles and flounders, with crab sauce;” a stuffed and roasted calf’s head “with purt’nance minced and liver fried;” and by way of a second course, roast leg of mutton and green peas. Peas were early, alas! in May, ’32.

“The cook was much commended for’t,

Fresh was the beer, and sound the port.”

At Chatham they went aboard two men-of-war, the Royal Sovereign and the Marlborough. In the churchyard at Hoo they found a curious epitaph, written by a “servant maid turned poetaster,” in honour of her master, who had left her all his money, and which Forrest thus, literally, transcribed——

“And. wHen. he. Died. you. plainly. see.

Hee. freely. gave. al. to Sara. passaWee.

And. in. Doing. so. it. DoTh. prevail.

that. Ion. him. can. well. besTowthis. Rayel

on. Year. sarved. him. it. is well. none

But. Thanks. beto. God. it. is. all. my One.”

How they lay two in a bed, drawing lots who should be the fifth, fortunate enough to sleep “without a chum;” how they were tormented with gnats, and tossed and tumbled, and, waking up in the morning, told their dreams, and could make nothing of them; how Hogarth and Scott played at “Scotch-hop” in the Town Hall, Rochester; how they pelted and bemired one another in country lanes and churchyards; how they perambulated the “Isle of Greane” and the “Isle of Shepey,” and came upon a party of men-’o-war’s men, who had been left without provisions by their midshipman, and learnt how the same midshipman had afterwards got into dire disgrace for philandering with a married lady of Queensborough; how they ate cockles with the sailors, and sent to the alehouse for beer to regale them; and treated a loquacious man of Queensborough to “t’other pot,” whereat the loquacious man began to abuse the mayor of that mighty borough as a mere custom-house officer; how they found the Market-place

“Just big enough to hold the stocks

And one if not two butchers’ blocks.”

how they abode at the “Swans,” and the landlady threatened to have Scott up before the mayor; how they heard the famous Isle of Sheppey legend of “Horse Church” and the wicked Lord of Shorland, so graphically narrated in our own days by Thomas Ingoldsby in the story beginning “‘He won’t,’ said the Baron. ‘Then bring me my boots.’” How at last they got back to Gravesend, put up at Mrs. Bramble’s again, and returned per tilt-boat very tired and jovial to London. All these notable incidents are set down with a charming simplicity, and an unflagging humour and good nature. Forrest, as I have said, kept the journal. Hogarth and Scott illustrated it. Thornhill made the map, and Tothall was the treasurer. The original drawings, done with a pen and washed with indian ink, and not unlike some of old Rowlandson’s rough sketches, are now in the Print Room of the British Museum. I believe this very interesting memorial of an English artist, this homely Liber Veritatis, was secured for our National Collection at the cost of a hundred pounds. Some of the drawings are capital; though all are of the very slightest. These boon companions were too much bent on enjoying themselves to work very hard. There is a view of Queensborough Market-place and Hôtel de Ville, the manner of taking the draught of which is thus described:—

“Then to our Swans returning, there

Was borrowed a great wooden chair,

And plac’d it in the open street

Where in much state did Hogarth sit

To draw the townhouse, church and steeple,

Surrounded by a crowd of people.

Tagrag and bobtail stood quite thick there

And cried ‘What a sweet pretty picture!’”

There is certainly nothing very elevated in good Mr. Forrest’s Hudibrastics; yet the jingle of his verse is by no means disagreeable; and from his simple description it is easy to form a definite notion of sturdy little Will Hogarth “sitting in much state” in the great wooden chair borrowed from the “Swans” at Queensborough, and gravely sketching with the tagrag and bobtail staring open-mouthed around him.

BREAKFASTING &c.

A still better word-picture by Forrest illustrates Hogarth’s drawing of Shaving in the Isle of Sheppey:

“Till six o’clock we quiet lay

And then got out for the whole day;

To fetch a barber out we send;

Stripp’d and in boots he doth attend,

For he’s a fisherman by trade;

Tann’d was his face, and shock his head;

He flours our heads and trims our faces,

And the top barber of the place is;

A bowl of milk and toasted bread

Are brought, of which, while Forrest eats,

To draw our pictures Hogarth sits;

Thornhill is in the barber’s hands;

Shaving himself, Will Tothall stands;

While Scott is in a corner sitting,

And an unfinished sketch completing.”

There is also a very droll tailpiece of Hogarth’s design, and freely, vigorously and racily touched.

The “Hudibrastics,” when the accounts were duly audited—and a rare chronicle these accounts are of pots of ale, cans of flip, bowls of punch, lobsters and tobacco—were handsomely bound to be preserved as a perpetual memorial of this famous expedition. By way of motto, Forrest prefixed to his poem a quotation of the inscription over Dulwich college porch, Abi tu, et fac similiter.

The great success of the Harlot’s Progress had naturally incited William Hogarth with a strong and almost fierce desire to accomplish some other work of the same satirical force, of the same breadth of morality with that excellent performance. He determined that there should be on record a sequel, or at least a pendant to the drama whose lamentable action his pencil had just so poignantly narrated. He felt that it was in him, that it was his vocation, his duty to follow step by step the career of human vice, to point, with unerring finger whither tend the crooked roads, to demonstrate as clearly as ever did mathematician—much more explicitly than ever did logician—that as surely as the wheels of the cart follow the hoofs of the horse, so surely will punishment follow sin. He was as yet but at the commencement of his trilogy: Clytemnestra might begin; Orestes might succeed; but the Eumenides had to come at last. He saw before him a whole ocean, seething, weltering, bubbling of pravities and impostures, and deadly lies, and evil passions. He heard the thorns crackling under the pot. He saw vice, not only stalking about with hungered looks, ragged garb and brandished bludgeon; now robbing Dr. Mead’s chariot in Holborn; now stopping the Bristol mail; now cutting Jonathan Wild’s throat on the leads before the Sessions House, and being pressed to death for it; now with sooty face and wild disguise of skins, stealing deer in the king’s forests, and rioting in caves on surreptitious venison and smuggled Nantz;[18] now being ducked for pocket-picking in the horse-pond behind the King’s Mews, Charing Cross; now cutting throats in night-cellars; now going filibustering, and suffering death for piracy, to be afterwards gibbeted at Halfway Creek and the Triptoptrees; but Vice in embroidery and Mechlin lace, with a silver-hilted sword, and a snuff-box enamelled by Rouquet, at its side; vice, painted and patched, whispering over fans, painted with Hogarth’s own “Progress” at Heidegger’s masquerade; vice punting at the “Young Man’s,” stock-jobbing in the Alley, brawling with porters and common bullies at the Rose, chaffering with horse-jockeys at Newmarket, clustered round the Cock-pit, applauding Broughton the ex-yeoman of the guard, pugilist, and lending its fine Holland shirt to Mr. Figg the prize-fighter after a bout at back or broadsword,[19] dancing attendance on the impudent and ugly German women, for whom the kings of England forsook their lawful wives, duelling in Hyde Park, and taking bribes in the very lobby of the Parliament House. William Hogarth knew that he was enjoined to mark this duplex vice, to burn it in the hand, to force it into the pillory, to pile the hundredweights of his indignation upon it in his own pressyard, to scathe and strangle it, and hang it as high as Haman, to be the loathing and the scorn of better-minded men. Between the summer lodgings at South Lambeth and other lodgings he took at Isleworth, between the portraits and conversations, and the book-plates and the benefit-tickets; odds and ends of artists’ work, done in the way of business for the lords and gentlemen who were good enough to employ him; shop-bills, “illustrating the commerce of Florence;” “breaking-up” tickets for Tiverton School; scenes from Paradise Lost; busts of Hesiod; tickets for Figg the prize-fighter, for Milward, Jemmy Spiller, Joe Miller, and other comedians; coats of arms for his friend George Lambert; caricatures of Orator Henley; benefit cards even for Harry Fielding, illustrating scenes from Pasquin and the Mock Doctor; between high jinks and suburban jaunts, and pleasant evening strolls in Vauxhall Gardens; between 1733 and 1735, he was planning, and maturing, and brooding over the Rake’s Progress. The experiment was a dangerous one. The public are averse from tolerating Paradise Regained after Paradise Lost, the Drunkard’s Children after the Bottle, the Marriage of Figaro after the Barber of Seville. And who has not yawned and rubbed his eyes over the second Faust? But William Hogarth saw his way clearly before him, and was determined to pursue it. The pictures, eight in number, were painted by the end of 1733. In 1734, the proposals of subscription to the plates were issued. The subscription ticket was the well-known etching of the Laughing Audience. The sums were one guinea and a half for nine plates; the ninth promised being The Humours of a Fair—no other than the far-famed Southwark.

Thus I sweep the stage, and sound the whistle for the curtain to draw up on the drama of The Rake’s Progress, closing this paper with the form of receipt given by Hogarth to his subscribers:

“Recd. Decr. 18th, of the Rt. Honble. Lord Biron, half a guinea, being the first payment for nine plates, eight of which represent a Rake’s Progress, and the ninth a Fair, which I promise to deliver at Michaelmas next, on receiving one guinea more. Note.—The Fair will be delivered at Christmas next, at sight of this receipt. The prints of the Rake’s Progress will be two guineas, after the subscription is over.”

“WILLIAM HOGARTH.”