In a kind of copartnership with Mr. Powell’s puppets—formerly of the Piazza, Covent Garden, was the famous Faux, the legerdemain, or sleight-of-hand conjuror—the Wiljalba Frikell of his day, and whom Hogarth mentions in one of his earliest pictorial satires. But Faux did that which the Russian magician, to his credit, does not do: he puffed himself perpetually, and was at immense pains to assure the public through the newspapers that he was not robbed returning from the Duchess of Buckingham’s at Chelsea. From Faux’s show at the “Long-room,” Hogarth might have stepped to Heidegger’s—hideous Heidegger’s masquerades at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket, where also were held “ridotti,” and “veglioni”—junketings of an ultra Italian character, and all presented in 1722 by the Middlesex grand jury as intolerable nuisances. Many times, also, did the stern Sir John Gonson (the Harlot’s Progress Gonson), justice of peace, much feared by the Phrynes of the hundreds of Drury, inveigh in his sessions-charges against the sinful ridotti and the disorderly veglioni. Other performances took place at the King’s Theatre. There was struggling for its first grasp on the English taste and the English pocket—a grasp which it has never since lost—that anomalous, inconsistent, delightful entertainment, the Italian Opera. Hogarth, as a true-born Briton, hated the harmonious exotic; and from his earliest plates to the grand series of the Rake’s Progress, indulges in frequent flings at Handel (in his Ptolomeo, and before his immortal Oratorio stage), Farinelli, Cuzzoni, Senesino, Faustina, Barrenstadt, and other “soft simpering whiblins.” Yet the sturdiest hater of this “new taste of the town” could not refrain from admiring and applauding to the echo that which was called the “miraculously dignified exit of Senesino.” This celebrated sortita must have resembled in the almost electrical effect it produced, the elder Kean’s “Villain, be sure thou prove,” &c. in Othello; John Kemble’s “Mother of the world—” in Coriolanus; Madame Pasta’s “Io,” in Medea; and Ristori’s world-known “Tu,” in the Italian version of the same dread trilogy. One of the pleasantest accusations brought against the Italian Opera was preferred some years before 1720, in the Spectator, when it was pointed out that the principal man or woman singer sang in Italian, while the responses were given, and the choruses chanted by Britons. Judices, in these latter days, I have “assisted” at the performance of the Barber of Seville at one of our large theatres, when Figaro warbled in Italian with a strong Spanish accent, when Susanna was a Frenchwoman, Doctor Bartolo an Irishman, and the chorus sang in English, and without any H’s.

More shows remain for Hogarth to take delight in. The quacks, out of Bartlemy time, set up their standings in Moorfields by the madhouse (illustrated by Hogarth in the Rake’s Progress), and in Covent Garden Market (W. H. in the plate of Morning), by Inigo Jones’s rustic church, which he built for the Earl of Bedford: “Build me a barn,” quoth the earl. “You shall have the bravest barn in England,” returned Inigo, and his lordship had it. There were quacks too, though the loud-voiced beggars interfered with them, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and on Tower Hill, where the sailors and river-side Bohemians were wont to indulge in their favourite diversion of “whipping the snake.” There were grand shows when a commoner was raised to the peerage or promoted in grade therein—a common occurrence in the midst of all the corruption entailed by the Scottish union and Walpole’s wholesale bribery. On these occasions, deputations of the heralds came from their dusty old college in Doctors’ Commons, and in full costume, to congratulate the new peer, the viscount made an earl, or the marquis elevated to a dukedom, and to claim by the way a snug amount of fees from the newly-blown dignitary. Strange figures they must have cut, those old kings-at-arms, heralds, and pursuivants! Everybody remembers the anecdote, since twisted into an allusion to Lord Thurlow’s grotesque appearance, of a servant on such an occasion as I have alluded to, saying to his master, “Please, my lord, there’s a gentleman in a coach at the door would speak with your lordship; and, saving your presence, I think he’s the knave of spades.” I burst out in unseemly cachinnation the other day at the opening of Parliament, when I saw Rougecroix trotting along the royal gallery of the peers, with those table-napkins stiff with gold embroidery pendent back and front of him like heraldic advertisements. The astonishing equipment was terminated by the black dress pantaloons and patent-leather boots of ordinary life. Je crevais de rire: the Lord Chamberlain walking backwards was nothing to it; yet I daresay Rougecroix looked not a whit more absurd than did Bluemantle and Portcullis in 1720 with red heels and paste buckles to their Cordovan shoon, and curly periwigs flowing from beneath their cocked hats.

Shows, more shows, and William Hogarth walking London streets to take stock of them all, to lay them up in his memory’s ample store-house. He will turn all he has seen to good account some day. There is a show at the museum of the Royal Society, then sitting at Gresham College. The queer, almost silly things, exhibited there! queer and silly, at least to us, with our magnificent museums in Great Russell Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Brompton. I am turning over the Royal Society catalogue as I write: the rarities all set down with a ponderous, simple-minded solemnity. “Dr. Grews” is the conscientious editor. Here shall you find the “sceptre of an Indian king, a dog without a mouth; a Pegue hat and organ; a bird of paradise; a Jewish phylactery; a model of the Temple of Jerusalem; a burning-glass contrived by that excellent philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton” (hats off); “three landskips and a catcoptrick paint given by Bishop Wilkins; a gun which discharges seven times one after the other presently” (was this a revolver?); “a perspective instrument by the ingenious Sir Christopher Wren” (hats off again); “a pair of Iceland gloves, a pot of Macassar poison” (oh! Rowland); “the tail of an Indian cow worshipped on the banks of the river Ganges; a tuft of coralline; the cramp fish which by some humour or vapour benumbs the fisherman’s arms,” and so forth. Hogarth will make use of all these “curios” in the fourth scene of the Marriage à la Mede, and presently, for the studio of Sidrophel in his illustrations to Hudibras.

And there are shows of a sterner and crueler order. Now a pick-pocket yelling under a pump; now a half-naked wretch coming along Whitehall at the tail of a slow-plodding cart, howling under the hangman’s lash (that functionary has ceased to be called “Gregory,” from the great executioner G. Brandon, and is now, but I have not been able to discover for what reason, “Jack Ketch”).[5] Now it is a libeller or a perjurer in the pillory at Charing in Eastcheap or at the Royal Exchange. According to his political opinions do the mob—the mob are chiefly of the Jacobite persuasion—pelt the sufferer with eggs and ordure, or cheer him, and fill the hat which lies at his foot on the scaffold with halfpence and even silver. And the sheriffs’ men, if duly fee’d, do not object to a mug of purl or mum, or even punch, being held by kind hands to the sufferer’s lips. So, in Hugo’s deathless romance does Esmeralda give Quasimodo on the carcan to drink from her flask. Mercy is as old as the hills, and will never die. Sometimes in front of “England’s Burse,” or in Old Palace Yard, an odd, futile, much-laughed-at ceremony takes place: and after solemn proclamation, the common hangman makes a bonfire of such proscribed books as Pretenders no Pretence, A sober Reply to Mr. Higgs’s Tri-theistical Doctrine. Well would it be if the vindictiveness of the government stopped here; but alas! king’s messengers are in hot pursuit of the unhappy authors, trace them to the tripe-shop in Hanging Sword Alley, or the cock-loft in Honey Lane Market, where they lie three in a bed; and the poor scribbling wretches are cast into jail, and delivered over to the tormentors, losing sometimes their unlucky ears. There is the great sport and show every market morning, known as “bull banking,” a sweet succursal to his Majesty’s bear-garden and Hockley in the hole. The game is of the simplest; take your bull in a narrow thoroughfare, say, Cock Hill, by Smithfield; have a crowd of hommes de bonne volonté; overturn a couple of hackney coaches at one end of the street, a brewer’s dray at the other: then harry your bull up and down, goad him, pelt him, twist his tail, till he roar and is rabid. This is “bull-banking,” and oh! for the sports of merry England! William Hogarth looks on sternly and wrathfully. He will remember the brutal amusements of the populace when he comes to engrave the Four Stages of Cruelty. But I lead him away now to other scenes and shows. There are the wooden horses before Sadler’s Hall; and westward there stands an uncomfortable “wooden horse” for the punishment of soldiers who are picketed thereon for one and two hours. This wooden horse is on St. James’s Mall, over against the gun-house. The torture is one of Dutch William’s legacies to the subjects, and has been retained and improved on by the slothfully cruel Hanoverian kings. Years afterwards (1745-6), when Hogarth shall send his picture of the March to Finchley to St. James’s for the inspection of his sacred Majesty King George the Second, that potentate will fly into a guard-room rage at the truthful humour of the scene, and will express an opinion that the audacious painter who has caricatured his Foot Guards, should properly suffer the punishment of the picket on the “wooden horse” of the Mall.

Further afield. There are literally thousands of shop-signs to be read or stared at. There are prize-fights—predecessors of Fig and Broughton contests—gladiatorial exhibitions, in which decayed Life-guardsmen and Irish captains trade-fallen, hack and hew one another with broadsword and backsword on public platforms. Then the “French prophets,” whom John Wesley knew, are working sham miracles in Soho, emulating—the impostors!—the marvels done at the tomb of the Abbé, Diacre or Chanoine, Paris, and positively holding exhibitions in which fanatics suffer themselves to be trampled, jumped upon, and beaten with clubs, for the greater glory of Molinism;[6] even holding academies, where the youth of both sexes are instructed in the arts of foaming at the mouth, falling into convulsions, discoursing in unknown tongues, revealing stigmata produced by the aid of lunar caustic, and other moon-struck madnesses and cheats. Such is revivalism in 1720. William Hogarth is there, observant. He will not forget the French prophets when he executes almost the last and noblest of his plates—albeit, it is directed against English revivalists, Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism. He leaves Soho, and wanders eastward and westward. He reads Madam Godfrey’s six hundred challenges to the female sex in the newspapers; sitting, perhaps, at the “Rose,” without Temple Bar; at the “Diapente,” whither the beaux, feeble as Lord Fanny, who could not “eat beef, or horse, or any of those things,” come to recruit their exhausted digestions with jelly-broth. He may look in at mug-houses, where stum, ’quest ales, Protestant masch-beer, and Derby stingo are sold. He may drop in at Owen Swan’s, at the “Black Swan” Tavern in St. Martin’s Lane, and listen to the hack-writers girding at Mr. Pope, and at the enormous amount of eating and drinking in Harry Higden’s comedies. He may see the virtuosi at Childs’s, and dozens of other auctions (Edward Mellington was the George Robins of the preceding age; the famous Cobb was his successor in auction-room eloquence and pomposity), buying china monsters. He may refect himself with hot furmity at the “Rainbow” or at “Nando’s,” mingle (keeping his surtout well buttoned) with the pickpockets in Paul’s, avoid the Scotch walk on ’Change, watch the garish damsels alight from their coaches at the chocolate-houses, mark the gamesters rushing in, at as early an hour as eleven in the morning, to shake their elbows at the “Young Man’s;” gaze at the barristers as they bargain for wherries at the Temple Stairs to take water for Westminster—a pair of sculls being much cheaper than a hackney coach—meet the half-pay officers at Whitehall, garrulously discussing the King of Spain’s last treaty, as the shoeblacks polish their footgear with oil and soot—Day and Martin are yet in embryo: stand by, on Holborn Hill, about half-past eleven, as Jack Hall, the chimney sweep, winds his sad way in Newgate cart, his coffin before him, and the ordinary with his book and nosegay by his side, towards St. Giles’s Pound, and the ultimate bourne, Tyburn. Jack Hall has a nosegay, too, and wears a white ribbon in his hat to announce his innocence. The fellow has committed a hundred robberies. And Jack Hall is very far gone in burnt brandy. Hogarth marks—does not forget him. Jack Hall—who seems to have been a kind of mediocre Jack Sheppard, although his escape from Newgate was well-nigh as dexterous, and quite as bold as the prison-breaking feat of the arch rascal, Blueskin’s friend—will soon reappear in one of the first of the Hogarthian squibs; and the dismal procession to Tyburn will form the dénoûment to the lamentable career of Tom Idle.

Hogarth must have become poco a poco saturated with such impressions of street life. From 1730 the tide of reproduction sets in without cessation; but I strive to catch and to retain the fleeting image of this dead London, and it baulks and mocks me:—the sham bail, “duffers” and “mounters,” skulking with straws in their shoes about Westminster Hall; the law offices in Chancery Lane and the “devil’s gap” between Great Queen Street and Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the Templars, the moot-men, and those who are keeping their terms in Lincoln’s and Gray’s Inn, dining in their halls at noon, eating off wooden trenchers, drinking from green earthenware jugs, and summoned to commons by horn-blow;—the furious stockjobbers at Jonathan’s and Garraway’s, at the sign of the “Fifteen Shillings,” and in Threadneedle Row; the fine ladies buying perfumery at the “Civet Cat,” in Shire Lane, by Temple Bar—perfumery, now-a-days, is much wanted in that unsavoury locale; the Jacobite ballad-singers growling sedition in Seven Dials; the Hanoverian troubadours crooning, on their side, worn-out scandal touching “Italian Molly” (James the Second’s Mary of Modena) and “St. James’s warming-pan” in the most frequented streets; riots and tumults, spy-hunting, foreigner mobbing, of not unfrequent occurrence, all over the town;—gangs of riotous soldiers crowding about Marlborough House, and casting shirts into the great duke’s garden, that his grace may see of what rascally stuff—filthy dowlas instead of good calico—the contractors have made them. Alas! a wheezing, drivelling, almost idiotic dotard is all that remains of the great duke, all that is left of John Churchill. He had just strength enough at the Bath the season before to crawl home in the dark night, in order to avoid the expense of a chair. There are fights in the streets, and skirmishes on the river, where revenue cutters, custom-house jerkers, and the “Tartar pink,” make retributive raids on the fresh-water pirates: light and heavy horsemen, cope-men, scuffle-hunters, lumpers, and game-watermen. There are salt-water as well as fresh-water thieves; and a notable show of the period is the execution of a pirate, and his hanging in chains at Execution dock. All which notwithstanding, it is a consolation to learn that “Captain Hunt, of the Delight,” is tried at Justice Hall for piracy, and “honourably acquitted.” I know not why, but I rejoice at the captain’s escape. He seems a bold, dashing spirit; and, when captured, was “drinking orvietan with a horse-officer.” But when I come to reperuse the evidence adduced on the trial, I confess that the weight of testimony bears strongly against Captain Hunt, and that in reality it would seem that he did scuttle the “Protestant Betsey,” cause the boatswain and “one Skeggs, a chaplain, transporting himself to the plantations”—at the request of a judge and jury, I wonder?—to walk the plank, and did also carbonado the captain with lighted matches and Burgundy pitch, prior to blowing his (the captain’s) brains out. Hunt goes free, but pirates are cast, and sometimes swing. Hogarth notes, comments on, remembers them. The gibbeted corsairs by the river’s side shall find a place in the third chapter of the history of Thomas Idle.

So wags the world in 1720. Hogarth practising on copper in the intervals of arms and crest engraving, and hearing of Thornhill and Laguerre’s staircase-and-ceiling-painting renown, inwardly longing to be a Painter. Sir George Thorold is lord mayor. Comet Halley is astronomer royal, vice Flamsteed, deceased the preceding year. Clement XI. is dying, and the Jews of Ferrara deny that they have sacrificed a child at Easter, à la Hugh of Lincoln. The great King Louis is dead, and a child reigns in his stead. The Regent and the Abbé Dubois are making history one long scandal in Paris. Bernard Lens is miniature painter to the king, in lieu of Benjamin Acland, dead. Mr. Colley Cibber’s works are printed on royal paper. Sheffield, Duke of Bucks, erects a plain tablet to the memory of John Dryden in Westminster Abbey: his own name in very large letters, Dryden’s in more moderately-sized capitals. Madam Crisp sets a lieutenant to kill a black man, who has stolen her lapdog. Captain Dawson bullies half the world, and half the world bullies Captain Dawson: and bullies or is so bullied still to this day.

In disjointed language, but with a very earnest purpose, I have endeavoured to trace our painter’s Prelude,—the growth of his artistic mind, the ripening of his perceptive faculties under the influence of the life he saw. Now, for the operation of observation, distilled in the retort of his quaint humour. I record the work he did; and first, in 1720, mention “four drawings in Indian ink” of the characters at Button’s coffee-house.[7] In these were sketches of Arbuthnot, Addison, Pope (as it is conjectured), and a certain Count Viviani, identified years afterwards by Horace Walpole, when the drawings came under his notice. They subsequently came into Ireland’s possession. Next Hogarth executed an etching, whose subject was of more national importance. In 1720-21, as all men know, England went mad, and was drawn, jumping for joy, into the Maëlstrom of the South Sea bubble. France had been already desperately insane, in 1719, and Philip, the Regent, with John Law of Lauriston, the Edinburgh silversmith’s son, who had been rake, bully, and soldier, and had stood his trial for killing Beau Wilson in a duel, had between them gotten up a remarkable mammon-saturnalia in the Palais Royal and the Rue Quincampoix. Law lived en prince in the Place Vendôme. They show the window now whence he used to look down upon his dupes. He died, a few years after the bursting of his bubble, a miserable bankrupt adventurer at Venice. And yet there really was something tangible in his schemes, wild as they were. The credit of the Royal Bank averted a national bankruptcy in France, and some substantial advantage might have been derived from the Mississippi trade. At all events, there actually was such a place as Louisiana. In this country, the geographical actualities were very little consulted. The English South Sea scheme was a swindle, pur et simple. Almost everybody in the country caught this cholera-morbus of avarice. Pope dabbled in S. S. S. (South Sea Stock): Lady Mary Wortley Montague was accused of cheating Ruremonde, the French wit, out of 500l. worth of stock. Ladies laid aside ombre and basset to haunt ’Change Alley. Gay “stood to win” enormous sums—at one time imagined himself, as did Pope also, to be the “lord of thousands,” but characteristically refused to follow a friend’s advice to realize at least sufficient to secure himself a “clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day for life.” He persisted in holding, and lost all. Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was deeply implicated in S. S. S. transactions, as were also many peers and members of parliament. The amiable and accomplished Craggs, the postmaster-general, the friend of all the wits, and for whose tomb Pope wrote so touching an epitaph, tarnished his reputation indelibly by unscrupulous jobbery. He died of the small-pox, just in time to avoid disgrace and ruin; but his poor old father was sold up, and was borne to the grave shortly afterward, broken-hearted. Lord Stanhope ruptured a blood-vessel in replying to a furious speech of the Duke of Wharton (who lived a profligate and died a monk) against S. S., and did not long survive. Samuel Chandler, the eminent Nonconformist divine, was ruined, and had to keep a book-stall for bread. Hudson, known as “Tom of Ten Thousand,” went stark mad, and moved about ’Change just as the “Woman in Black” and the “Woman in White” (the son of the one, and the brother of the other were hanged for forgery), used to haunt the avenues of the Bank of England. The South Sea Company bribed the Government, bribed the two Houses, and bribed the Court ladies, both of fair and of light fame. Erengard Melusina Schuylenberg, Princess von Eberstein, Duchess of Munster (1715), and Duchess of Kendal (1729)—Hogarth engraved the High Dutch hussey’s arms—the Countess of Platen, and her two nieces, and Lady Sunderland, with Craggs and Aislabie, got the major part of the fictitious stock of 574,000l. created by the company. The stock rose to thirteen hundred and fifty pounds premium! Beggars on horseback tore through the streets. There were S. S. coaches with Auri sacra fames painted on the panels. Hundreds of companies were projected, and “took the town” immensely. Steele’s (Sir Richard’s) Fishpool Company, for bringing the finny denizens of the deep by sea to London—Puckle’s Defence Gun—the Bottomree, the Coral-fishery, the Wreck-fishing companies, were highly spoken of. Stogden’s remittances created great excitement in the market. There were companies for insurance against bad servants, against thefts and robberies, against fire and shipwreck. There were companies for importing jack-asses from Spain (coals to Newcastle!); for trading in human hair (started by a clergyman); for fattening pigs; for making pantiles, Joppa and Castile soap; for manufacturing lutestring; “for the wheel of a perpetual motion;” and for extracting stearine from sunflower-seed. There were Dutch bubbles, and oil bubbles, and water bubbles—bubbles of timber, and bubbles of glass. There were the “sail cloth,” or “Globe permits”—mere cards with the seal of the “Globe” tavern impressed on them, and “permitting” the fortunate holders to acquire shares at some indefinite period in some misty sailcloth factory. These sold for sixty guineas a piece. There was Jezreel Jones’s trade to Barbary, too, for which the permits could not be sold fast enough. Welsh copper and York Buildings’ shares rose to cent. per cent. premium. Sir John Blunt, the scrivener, rose from a mean estate to prodigious wealth, prospered, and “whale directors ate up all.” There was an S. S. literature—an S. S. anthology.

“Meantime, secure on Garrway’s cliffs,

A savage race, by shipwreck fed,