[6] On what authority this is said, I am yet to learn. The registers of St. Bartholomew the Great, and of St. Bartholomew the Less, have both been searched for the same information, with fruitless solicitude. The school of Hogarth's father, in 1712, was in the parish of St. Martin's Ludgate. In the register of that parish, therefore, the births of his children, and his own death, may probably be found.[A]
[A] The register of St. Martin's Ludgate, has also been searched to no purpose.
[7] This circumstance has, since it was first written, been verified by a gentleman who has often heard a similar account from one of the last Head Assay-Masters at Goldsmiths-Hall, who was apprentice to a silversmith in the same street with Hogarth, and intimate with him during the greatest part of his life.
[8] Universal Museum, 1764. p. 549. The same kind of revenge, however, was taken by Verrio, who, on the cieling of St. George's Hall at Windsor, borrowed the face of Mrs. Marriot, the housekeeper, for one of the Furies.
[9] This picture is noticed in the article Thornhill, in the Biographia Britannica, where, instead of Wanstead, it is called the Wandsworth assembly. There seems to be a reference to it in "A Poetical Epistle to Mr. Hogarth, an eminent History and Conversation Painter," written June 1730, and published by the author (Mr. Mitchell), with two other epistles, in 1731, 4to.
"Large families obey your hand;
Assemblies rise at your command."
Mr. Hogarth designed that year the frontispiece to Mr. Mitchell's Opera, The Highland Clans.
[10] Of all these a more particular account will be given in the Catalogue annexed.
[11] Brother to Henry Overton, the well-known publisher of ordinary prints, who lived over against St. Sepulchre's Church, and sold many of Hogarth's early pieces coarsely copied, as has since been done by Dicey in Bow Church-yard.
[12] This conceit is borrowed from Vanloo's picture of Colley Cibber, whose daughter has the same employment.