To be understood, however, it is certainly best to place design and explanation side by side.
Mrs. Hogarth also had a dog, which eventually was buried at the end of a filbert walk in her yard at Chiswick. A stone marked the grave, and Hogarth himself cut the epitaph:
“Life to the last enjoyed, here Pompey lies.”
I tried not long ago, though without success, to find some trace of this grave. In the oldest, quaintest part of Chiswick stands Hogarth’s house, still bearing his name, and probably, as to stone and mortar, much the same as when he lived there. But the once beautiful garden is now in part a vegetable plot, and in part an untidy barnyard. A venerable mulberry-tree and some gnarled old yews are still standing—“sole relics of a finer past”; but of the filbert walk there remains only a row of little stumps with here and there a straggling branch. No trace of Pompey anywhere, unless in tradition; “she had heard,” said the mistress of the house, “that a dog had been buried somewhere there.” And—final touch—two pigs looked out from the doorway, squealing shrilly as we passed! It seemed a pity that Hogarth should not see them; no one would have sooner appreciated the humor of the scene. But—life to the last enjoyed—he lies in Chiswick churchyard.
Famous among Middle Age painters was Paolo Uccello—Paul of the Birds—who won this sobriquet by his extreme delight in birds. They were his ruling passion, and appeared in his pictures both in and out of season.
PORTRAIT OF ALBRECHT DURER AT THIRTEEN.
(Drawn by himself. )
More famous was the eccentric Bazzi, who, according to the pleasant old gossip, Vasari, “was fond of keeping in his house all sorts of strange animals—badgers, squirrels, cat-a-mountains, dwarf monkeys, horses, racers, little Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, doves of India, and other creatures of this kind, so many as he could lay his hands on.” Over and above, he had a raven which had learned to talk and to imitate its master’s voice, especially in answering a knock at the door. “His house was like nothing more than a Noah’s ark,” adds Vasari.