Hogarth embarking at the Isle of Grain.
—————— on hands and knees we crawl,
And so get safe on board the yawl.
Gostling.
This sheet is dedicated to the five days’ travels, in 1732, of him
That drew th’ essential form of grace,
That saw the manners in the face,
and four of his friends. “Some few copies of the Tour,” says Horace Walpole, “were printed by Mr. Nichols. It was a party of pleasure down the river into Kent, undertaken by Mr. Hogarth, Mr. Scott, and three of their friends, in which they intended to have more humour than they accomplished, as is commonly the case in such meditated attempts. The Tour was described in verse by one of the company, and the drawings executed by the painters, but with little merit, except the views taken by Mr. Scott.”
Walpole’s account is an incorrect and contemptuous flout of “a merry, and a very merry” party, consisting—besides Hogarth, and his friend Scott, a landscape painter—of Thornhill, (son of sir James, whose daughter Hogarth married;) Tothall, a woollendraper at the corner of Tavistock-court, Covent-garden, who, being a member of the club at the Bedford coffee-house, became intimate with Hogarth; and Forrest, another of Hogarth’s friends. They “accomplished” much “humour,” as their journal shows; though not to the understanding of Walpole, who was only a fine gentleman, a wit, and an adept in artificial knowledge.
A few months ago, I heard from the lips of the kindest and most exquisite humourist of the age, what seems to me a perfect definition—“Humour is Wit steeped in Mannerism.” Walpole could never say, because he never thought, or felt, any thing like it. He was skilled in imitative matters alone: he brought himself up to Art, and there stopped; his good breeding would not permit him to deviate towards Nature. He talked of it as people of fashion do of trade—a vulgar thing, which they are obliged to hear something about, and cannot help being influenced by.
The “some few copies of the Tour,” which Horace Walpole says “were printed by Mr. Nichols,” and which he represents as having been “described in verse by one of the company,” Mr. Nichols certainly printed in 1781; but that gentleman acquaints us, that it “was the production of the ingenious Mr. W. Gostling, of Canterbury,” who was not of the party. Mr. Nichols reprinted it at the request of some friends, on account of its rarity, in his “Biographical Anecdotes of Hogarth.” The account of the “Tour,” really written “by one of the company,” was in prose; and this, which certainly Walpole had not seen, was edited, and given to the world, by Mr. R. Livesay, in 1782, on nine oblong folio pages, with etchings of the same size.
The Tour in question was not “meditated.” The party set out at midnight, at a moment’s warning, from the Bedford Arms tavern, each with a shirt in his pocket. They had particular departments to attend to. Hogarth and Scott made the drawings; Thornhill (Hogarth’s brother-in-law) the map; Tothall faithfully discharged the joint office of treasurer and caterer; and Forrest wrote the journal. They were out five days only; and on the second night after their return, the book was produced, bound, gilt, and lettered, and read at the same tavern to the members of the club then present. A copy of the journal having been left in the hands of the Rev. Mr. Gostling, (author of “A Walk in and about Canterbury,”) he wrote an imitation of it in Hudibrastic verse, of which Mr. Nichols printed twenty copies as a literary curiosity.[345]