“The End of All Things!” was his reply.
That “Bathos” plate was prophetical.
Well, the journey is over. He has arrived in Leicester Fields. That night, going to bed, “he was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rang his bell with such violence that he broke it [that was so like Hogarth], and expired about two hours afterwards.”
His house, the last but two on the east side of Leicester Square, became later the smaller half of the Sablonière, or Jaquier’s Hotel. It is now Archbishop Tenison’s school. From the windows you look down upon the white bust by Joseph Durham, lean and watchful, that stands in a corner of modern, spruce Leicester Square.
I should like to see carved upon the bust the characteristic concluding passage of Hogarth’s disjointed autobiography:—
“This I can safely attest, I have invariably endeavoured to make those about me tolerably happy, and my greatest enemy cannot say I ever did an intentional injury: though, without ostentation, I could produce many instances of men that have been essentially benefited by me. What may follow, God knows.”
We know what has followed in this world—acknowledgment, admiration, the title of the Father of British Painting, and the example of a man who endured to the end, which is the most difficult of all the enterprises of life. For the end approaches to most of us when we are weakest. Hogarth broke the bell-rope.