Seven of the drawings were in the possession of the late Mr. Samuel Ireland, three are in Holland, and two are said to have been in the collection of a person in one of the northern provinces about twenty years ago, but are now probably destroyed. Thus are the works of genius scattered like the Sibyl's leaves.
Hogarth seems to have been particularly partial to this subject; for, previous to engraving the twelve large plates, he painted it in oil. The twelve original pictures, somewhat larger than the prints, are in the possession of the editor of these volumes.
The variety with which the characteristic distinctions of the figures are marked, the firm and spirited touch with which each of the characters are pencilled, is peculiar to this artist: they come into that class of pictures, which to those who have not seen them cannot be described; to those who have, a description is unnecessary.
In a masquerade ticket, published 1727, he has a second time introduced John James Heidegger, of ill-favoured memory. Notwithstanding Lord Chesterfield's wager, that this Surintendant des plaisirs d'Angleterre did not produce a man with so hideous a countenance as his own, and Pope having honoured him with a place in his Dunciad, when describing
"A monster of a fowl,
Something between a Heidegger and owl,"
and his ugliness being in a degree proverbial, an engraving of his face from a mask, taken after his death, and inserted in Lavater's Physiognomy, has strong marks of a benevolent character, and features by no means displeasing or disagreeable.
The print of our decollating Harry and Anna Boleyne, is engraved from a painting once in Vauxhall Gardens.[9] Whatever might be the picture, the print is in every point of view contemptible. His frontispieces to Apuleius and Cassandra, Perseus and Andromeda, John Gulliver, and the Highland Fair, come in precisely the same class. Those to Terræ Filius, the Humours of Oxford, and Tom Thumb, have some traces of comedy.
Various temporary satires on the local follies and vices of the day, which he engraved about this time, are enumerated by Mr. Walpole and Mr. Nichols, but have not in general much merit. The compliments he paid to Sir James Thornhill, by ridiculing William Kent, have been noticed in the preceding pages; but Hogarth's partiality was not confined to the knight, he extended it to the knight's daughter, and finding favour in her sight,—without the formal ceremony of asking consent, or the tedious process of a settlement,—took her to wife. This union being neither sanctioned by her father,[10] nor accompanied with a fortune, compelled him to redouble his professional exertions.