Nor was he too nice in his choice of subjects for way-side treatment. One of his fellow-apprentices used to relate an anecdote of the time when they were accustomed to make the usual Sunday excursion into the country, Hogarth being fifteen years of age. In a tap-room row a man received a severe cut upon the forehead with a quart beer-pot, which brought blood, and caused him to "distort his features into a most hideous grin." Hogarth produced his pencil and instantly drew a caricature of the scene, including a most ludicrous and striking likeness of the wounded man. There was of necessity a good deal of tap-room in all humorous art and literature of that century, and he was perfectly at home in scenes of a beery cast.

The "Five Days' Peregrination" of Hogarth and his friends, of which Thackeray discoursed to us so agreeably in one of his lectures, occurred when the artist was thirty-four years of age. But it shows us the same jovial Londoner, whose manners and pleasures, as Mr. Thackeray remarked, though honest and innocent, were "not very refined." Five friends set out on foot early in the morning from their tavern haunt in Covent Garden, gayly singing the old song, "Why should we quarrel for riches?" Billingsgate was their first halting-place, where, as the appointed historian of the jaunt records, "Hogarth made the caricature of a porter, who called himself the Duke of Puddle Dock," which "drawing was by his grace pasted on the cellar door." At Rochester, "Hogarth and Scott stopped and played at hop-scotch in the colonnade under the Town-hall." The Nag's Head at the village of Stock sheltered them one night, when, after supper, "we adjourned to the door, drank punch, stood and sat for our pictures drawn by Hogarth." In another village the merry blades "got a wooden chair, and placed Hogarth in it in the street, where he made the drawing, and gathered a great many men, women, and children about him to see his performance." The same evening, over their flip, they were entertaining the tap-room with their best songs, when some Harwich lobster-men came in and sung several sea-songs so agreeably that the Londoners were "quite put out of countenance." "Our St. John," records the scribe of the adventure, "would not come in competition, nor could Pishoken save us from disgrace." Here, too, is a Hogarthian incident: "Hogarth called me up and told me the good-woman insisted on being paid for her bed, or having Scott before the mayor, which last we did all in our power to promote." And so they merrily tramped the country round, singing, drawing, copying comic epitaphs, and pelting one another with dirt, returning to London at the end of the five days, having expended just six guineas—five shillings a day each man.

Time Smoking a Picture.

His sense of humor appears in his serious writings. One illustration which he gives in his "Analysis of Beauty," to show the essential and exhaustless charm of the waving line, is in the highest degree comic: "I once heard an eminent dancing-master say that the minuet had been the study of his whole life, and that he had been indefatigable in the pursuit of its beauties, yet at last could only say, with Socrates, he knew nothing, adding that I was happy in my profession as a painter, in that some bounds might be set to the study of it."

In his long warfare with the picture-dealers, who starved living art in England by the manufacture of "old masters," he employed ridicule and caricature with powerful effect. His masterly caricature of "Time smoking a Picture" was well seconded by humorous letters to the press, and by many a passing hit in his more elaborate writings. He maintained that a painting is never so good as at the moment it leaves the artist's hands, time having no possible effect upon it except to impair its beauty and diminish its truth. There was penned at this period a burlesque "Bill of Monsieur Varnish to Benjamin Bister," which is certainly Hogarthian, if it is not Hogarth's, and might well serve as a companion piece to the engraving. Among the items are these:

£s.d.
To painting and canvas for a naked Mary Magdalen, in the undoubted style of Paul Veronese220
To brimstone, for smoking ditto020
Paid Mrs. W—— for a live model to sit for Diana bathing, by Tintoretto0160
Paid for the hire of a layman, to copy the robes of a Cardinal, for a Vandyck050
Paid the female figure for sitting thirty minutes in a wet sheet, that I might give the dry manner of that master0106
The Tribute-money Rendered, with all the exactness of Quintin Metsius, the famed blacksmith of Antwerp2126
The Martyrdom of St. Winifred, with a view of Holywell Bath, by old Frank1116
To a large allegorical altarpiece, consisting of men and angels, horses and river gods; 'tis thought most happily hit off for a Rubens550
Paid for admission into the House of Peers, to take a sketch of a great character, for a picture of Moses breaking the Tables of the Law, in the darkest manner of Rembrandt, not yet finished026

The idea of a wet sheet imparting the effect of dryness was taken from a treatise on painting, which stated that "some of the ancient masters acquired a dry manner of painting from studying after wet drapery."

This robust and downright Briton, strong in the consciousness of original and native genius, did not object merely to the manufacture of old masters, but also to the excessive value placed upon the genuine productions of the great men of old. He could not feel it to be just or favorable to the progress of art that works representing a state of feeling long ago outgrown in England should take precedence of paintings instinct with the life of the present hour. In other words, he did not enjoy seeing one of his own paintings sell at auction for fourteen guineas, and an Old Master bring a thousand. He grew warm when he denounced "the picture-jobbers from abroad," who imported continually "ship-loads of dead Christs, Holy Families, Madonnas, and other dismal, dark subjects, neither entertaining nor ornamental, on which they scrawl the terrible cramp names of some Italian masters, and fix upon us Englishmen the name of universal dupes." He imagines a scene between one of those old-master mongers and his customer. The victim says: