Nods to the axe, till with a groaning sound
It sinks, and spreads its honours on the ground,"—
he sunk to the floor, and there,—as the divine Ossian would have sublimely expressed it,—The grey mist swam before his eyes. He lay in the hall of mirth as a mountain pine, when it tumbles across the rushy Loda.—He recovered; lifted up his bleeding head, and rolled his full-orbed eyes around. He ascended as a pillar of smoke streaked with fire, and streams of blood ran down his dark brown cheeks, like torrents from the summit of an oozy rock, etc. etc.
To descend from the pinnacle of Parnassus to the plain of common sense,—the fellow being deeply, though not dangerously, wounded in the forehead, extreme agony excited a most hideous grin. His woe-begone figure, opposed to the pert triumphant air of his tiny conqueror, and the half suppressed laugh of his surrounding friends, presented a scene too ridiculous to be resisted. The young tyro seized his pencil, drew his first group of portraits from the life, and gave, with a strong resemblance of each, such a grotesque variety of character as evades all description.
When we consider this little sketch was his coup d'essai, the loss of it is much to be regretted.
He probably made many others during his apprenticeship. When that expired, bidding adieu to red lions and green dragons, he endeavoured to attain such knowledge of drawing as would enable him to delineate the human figure, and transfer his burin from silver to copperplate. In this attempt he had to encounter many difficulties; engraving on copper was so different an art from engraving on silver, that it was necessary he should unlearn much which he had already learned; and at twenty years of age, habits are too deeply rooted to be easily eradicated; so that he never attained the power of describing that clear, beautiful stroke which was then given by some foreign artists, and has since been brought, I believe, to its utmost perfection by Sir Robert Strange.
In his first efforts he had little more assistance than could be acquired by casual communications, or imitating the works of others;[4] those of Callot were probably his first models; and shop-bills and book-plates his first performances. Some of these, with impressions from tankards and tea-tables which escaped the crucible, have, by the laudable industry of collectors, been preserved to the present day. How far they add to the artist's fame, or are really of the value at which they are sometimes purchased, is a question of too high import for me to decide. By the connoisseur it is asserted, that the earliest productions of a great painter ought to be preserved, for they soar superior to the mature labours of plodding dulness, and though but seeds of that genius intended by nature to tower above its contemporaries, invariably exhibit clear marks of mind; as every variety in the branches of a strong-ribbed oak is, by the aid of a microscope, discoverable in the acorn.
By the opposite party it is urged, that collecting these blotted leaves of fancy, is burying a man of talents in the ruins of his baby-house; and that for the honour of his name, and repose of his soul, they ought to be consigned to the flames, rather than pasted in the portfolio.
I must candidly acknowledge, that for trifles by the hand of Hogarth or Mortimer, I have a kind of religious veneration; but, like the rebuses and riddles of Swift, they are still trifles, and except when considered as tracing the progress of the mind from infancy to manhood, are not entitled to much attention. If examined with this regard, especial care should be taken that their names are not dishonoured by the unmeaning and contemptible productions of inferior artists, some of whose prints have found a place in the catalogue of Hogarth's works. Mr. Nichols properly questions the plate of Æneas in a Storm: he might safely put the same query to Riche's Triumphal Entry into Covent Garden, and a few other plates, which some of the collectors have very positively asserted to be his. The Jack in Office and Pug the Painter, I believe, belong to other collectors. That the design for General Wolfe's monument should ever be supposed the work of Hogarth, has often astonished me. I do not see the most distant resemblance of his manner, in mind, conception, design, or execution.