The biographers who have written of artists, especially if the hero of their history was of the Dutch school, generally began by informing us that he received the rudiments of his art from the great Van A—, who was a pupil of the divine Van B—, first the disciple, and afterwards the rival, of the immortal and never enough to be admired Vander C.
This palette pedigree was not the boast of William Hogarth; he was the pupil,—the disciple,—the worshipper of nature!
I do not learn that his family either obtained a grant of lands from our first William, or flourished before the Conquest; but from Burn's History of Westmoreland, it appears that his grandfather was an honest yeoman, the inhabitant of a small tenement in the vale of Bampton, a village fifteen miles north of Kendal, and had three sons. The eldest, in conformity to ancient custom, succeeded to the title, honour, and estate of his father, became a yeoman of Bampton, and proprietor of the family freehold.
The second was not endowed with either land or beeves, but had in their stead a large portion of broad humour and wild original genius. Like his nephew, he grasped the whip of satire; and though his lash was not twisted with much skill, nor brandished with much grace, it was probably felt by those on whom his strokes were inflicted, more than would one of the most exquisite workmanship.
He was the Shakspeare of his village, and his dramas were the delight of the country; though, being written by an uneducated yeoman, it may naturally be supposed they were sufficiently coarse. Mr. Nichols, in his Anecdotes, tells us that he has seen a whole bundle of them, and want of grammar, metre, sense, and decency is their invariable characteristic. This may possibly be true, for in refinement Westmoreland was many, many years behind the capital; and our libraries contain sundrie black-letter proofs that those pithie, pleasaunte, and merrie comedies, which in the same century were enacted by the Kingis servantes with universal applause, had similar wants; notwithstanding which, these unalloyed chronicles of our ancestors' dulness are now purchased at a price considerably higher than virgin gold. Let it not from hence be imagined that I mean to sanction one folly by the mention of another; but as every human production is relative, if auld Hogarth, under the circumstances he wrote, was the admiration of his neighbours, we may fairly infer that his talents, properly cultivated, would, in a more polished situation, have ensured him the admiration of his contemporaries.[2]
Richard was the third son, and seems to have been intended for a scholar,—the scholar of his family!—for he was educated at St. Bees, in Westmoreland, and afterward kept a school in the same county. Of learning he had a portion more than sufficient for his office, for he wrote a Latin and English dictionary, which still exists in MS., and one of his Latin letters, dated 1657, preserved in the British Museum. However well he might be qualified for a teacher, he had few pupils; and finding that his employment produced neither honour nor profit, removed to London, and in Ship Court, Old Bailey, renewed his profession.
It was fortunate for literature that Doctor Samuel Johnson was not successful in an application for the place of a provincial schoolmaster. It was fortunate for the arts that Richard Hogarth was not able to establish a village school, in which situation he would probably have qualified his son William for his successor; and those talents which were calculated to instruct, astonish, and reform a world, might have been wasted in teaching some half a hundred of the young Westmoreland gentry to scan verses by their fingers, and call English things by Latin names. The fates ordained otherwise; it was his destiny to marry and reside in London, where were born unto him one son and two daughters.
The girls had such instructions as qualified them to keep a shop; and the son, who drew his first breath in this bustling world in the year 1697, was author of the prints which, copied in little, form the basis and give the value to these volumes.