Per minus castus Druriæ tabernas
Lenis incedens, abeas Diones
Æquus Alumnis!”
And so forth.
[13] He sat for Melcombe Regis in the two last parliaments of George the First. The borough was then a mere pocket one, in the gift of the backstairs. Thornhill’s “employments” were continued to him for some time by George the Second; but, like his predecessor, Sir Christopher Wren, he was removed to make way for place-men who, without any very high attainments, could be useful to the Ministry. Thenceforth, the “goodman” amused himself by painting easel-pictures. He was taken for death in an access of gout, and died in his chair on the 4th of May, and was buried at Stalbridge on the 13th. He had greatly beautified the ancestral mansion and estate, and had erected, on an adjacent hill, an obelisk to the memory of George the First, which was visible to all the country side. Hogarth himself records the death of his father-in-law, in Sylvanus Urban’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine—then a very young publication, indeed. He says that he was “the greatest history painter this age has seen;” and states, that as king’s sergeant painter he had to decorate all his majesty’s coaches, barges, and “the royal navy.” Are we to understand from this that Thornhill was expected to carve and gild the figure heads of three-deckers!
[14] Thomas Coram was born in 1668. He had amassed a competence in following the sea, and lived at Rotherhithe, like Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and that greater mariner, Captain Cuttle. In his way to and from the maritime districts of the town, his honest heart was frequently afflicted by the sight of destitute and abandoned children. Probably he had never heard of St. Vincent de Paul—this rough tarry-breeks of the Benbow and Cloudesley Shovel era—but he set about doing the selfsame work as that for which the foreign philanthropist was canonized. Coram had already effected much good by procuring an Act granting a bounty on naval stores imported to Georgia—where the colonists were frequently left destitute—and by devising an admirable scheme for the education of Indian girls. The Foundling Hospital was, however, his great work. He obtained the charter of incorporation for it, A.D. 1739. These were the words, of which I have given the sense above:—“I have not wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in self-indulgence or vain expense; and am not ashamed to confess, that in this, my old age, I am poor.” They raised a pension of a hundred a year for the benevolent veteran; Sir Sampson Gideon and Dr. Brocklesby being chief managers of the fund. Captain Coram did not live long to enjoy the pension; and at his death, it was continued to poor old Leveridge, to whose volume of songs William Hogarth contributed a frontispiece.
[15] One moment ere I leave the male and female naughtinesses in this drama for good. Charteris, Hackabout, brother and sister, James Dalton, the highwayman, whose “wig-box” you see in plate iii. of the H. P., and Mother Needham, who continued the traditions of Dryden’s Mother Dulake (“Wild Gallant”), to Foote’s Mother Cole, all faded into space before 1733. The colonel “Don Francisco”—as people with a snigger called Charteris—was very nearly being hanged. He was cast for death; but being immensely rich, and having, moreover, and luckily, a lord of the land, the Earl of Wemyss, for his son-in-law, he managed to escape. Not, indeed, Scot-free. He was compelled to make a handsome settlement on his victim, one Ann Bond, prosecutrix in the case for which Don Francisco had so close a riddance of “sus per coll” being written against his name. The sheriffs of London, and the high bailiff of Westminster, had, moreover, made a seizure of his rich goods and chattels, immediately after his conviction. He had to compound with them for the restitution of his effects, and this cost him nearly nine thousand pounds. The profligate old miser had to sell his South Sea stock, to raise the amount; a fact which the newspapers of the day record with much exultation. But Nemesis was not yet satisfied. The colonel’s wife came back from Scotland on purpose to reproach her lord. The wretched man on his part fled to Scotland, and died in Edinburgh soon afterwards. Dalton, of the “wig-box,” having been “boned,” “habbled,” or “snabbled,” and confined for some time in the “Rumbo,” or “Whid,” finished his career at the “nubbing cheat,” at the top of the Edgware Road. In other words—the first are the elegant terms used by the City marshal in his controversial pamphlet the Regulator, written in disparagement of Mr. Jonathan Wild the great—Mr. James Dalton was arrested, and after lying some time in Newgate, was duly tried, sentenced, and hanged. “He was a thief from his cradle, and imbibed the principles of his art with his mother’s milk.” He went between his father’s legs in the cart to his fatal exit at Tyburn. Sic itur ad astra; and thus Plutarch in the shape of the ordinary of Newgate. As for Mother Needham, she was sentenced to stand twice in the pillory. The first ordeal she underwent close to her own house, in Park Place, St. James’. She was very ill, and lay “all along” under these Caudine forks, “thus evading the law, which required that her face should be exposed.” Two days afterwards, “complaining of the ingratitude of the publick”—the mob had pelted her pitilessly—“and dreading the second pillorying to which, in Old Palace Yard, she was doomed, she gave up the ghost.”
[16] The Modern Midnight Conversation had a great vogue abroad, and is still, perhaps, one of the best known of Hogarth’s works. Copies, adaptations, paraphrases of it have been multiplied to a vast extent in Germany. There is a well-known French version, Société nocturne, nommée communément Cotterie de Débauche en Punch; and a collection of heads from the Conversation, catalogued as Têtes des onze membres, gravées par M. Riepenhausen. One ingenious artist even formed a gallery of small wax models of the principal figures. And finally, I have seen the French Cotterie enamelled on a porcelain at Leipsic, and on a golden snuffbox in the museum of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. There is a humorous modern lithograph, representing a party of sapient-looking bibbers, assembled in solemn conclave over a hogshead of Rhine wine in a cellar; and the hint for this—albeit, the grossness is softened down—is evidently taken from the M. M. C.
[17] Tothall’s career was a most curious one. He was the son of an apothecary, was left an orphan, taken care of by an uncle. He ran away to sea; went to the West Indies, Newfoundland, and Honduras; was on one occasion captured by hostile Spaniards, and marched “up the country,” with no other clothing but a woollen cap and a brown waistcoat—a costume almost as primitive as that of an unhappy French governess taken prisoner by some followers of Schamyl, in a raid on the Russians, and driven before them to their mountain home, the poor lady having nothing on but a pair of blue satin corsets. Tothall had his picture painted in the brown waistcoat. Coming afterwards to England, he entered the service of a woollen draper, in Tavistock Court; who, after some time, told him he was a very honest fellow, and that as he the draper only sold cloth, Tothall might have half the shop to sell shalloons and trimmings. He lent him money to buy stock, and recommended him to his chapmen. By and bye, a relative of Tothall in the West Indies sent him a puncheon of rum as a present. The recipient was about to sell the alcohol for what it would fetch—perhaps to the landlord of the Bedford Head—when his master interposed. “I have no use for my cellar,” quoth this benevolent woollen draper. “Do you open the door to the street; tap your puncheon, and draw it off in twopennyworths.” Spirit licences were not yet known. Tothall followed the draper’s advice, speedily sold all his rum at a good profit; sent to the West Indies for more, and drove a merry trade in rum, shalloons, and trimmings, till it occurred to the woollen draper to inform him one morning that he intended to retire, that he might have all his stock at prime cost, and pay him as he could. Why are there no such woollen-drapers now-a-days? Between the shop and the cellar Tothall contrived to realize a very considerable fortune. All this time, this odd man had been assiduously collecting fossils, minerals, and shells, of which he had, at last, a handsome museum. He retired to Dover, and, true to his old adventurous habits, entered into large speculations, in what his biographer modestly calls the “smuggling branch of business.” But a “byeboat,” laden with horses, in which he was interested, having been lost between Flushing and Ostend, and some other speculations turning out disastrously, Tothall became in his later days somewhat straitened in his circumstances. Hogarth used frequently to visit him at a little village near Dover, whither he retired, and where he died four years after our painter. He left 1,500l. in cash, and his collection of shells, &c. sold for a handsome sum.
[18] Vide the statutes at largo for the “Black Act,” by which poaching in disguise was made a felony, punishment death; and the curious relation of the gentleman who fell among a gang of “Blacks,” and was courteously entreated by them, and regaled at a rich supper, at which the solids were composed exclusively of venison, on condition, only, of never revealing the place of these sooty poachers’ retreat.