great traveller; and beyond the Calais ship just spoken of, does not appear to have undertaken any journeys more important than the immortal excursion to Rochester, of which the chronicle, illustrated by his own sketches, is still extant, (those doughty setters-forth from the Bedford Head were decidedly the first Pickwickians,) and a jaunt to St. Alban's after Culloden, to sketch the trapped fox Simon Fraser Lord Lovat, as he sate in the inn-room under the barber's hands, counting the dispersed Highland clans and their available forces of caterans and brae-men on his half-palsied, crooked, picking and stealing fingers.
William Hogarth did but one romantic thing in his life, and that was, to run away with Sir James Thornhill's pretty daughter; and even that escapade soon resolved itself into a cheery, English, business-like, house-*keeping union. Papa-in-law—who painted cathedral cupolas at forty shillings a yard—forgave William and Jane. William loved his wife dearly—she had her tempers, and he was not a man of snow—took a country house for her, and set up a coach when things were going prosperously and he was Sergeant Painter to King George; and when William (not quite a dotard, as the twin-scamps Wilkes and Churchill called him) died, Jane made a comfortable living by selling impressions of the plates he had engraved. These and the writing of the Analysis of Beauty, the dispute concerning Sigismunda, the interest taken in the welfare of the Foundling Hospital, the dedication [in a pique against the king who hated "boets and bainters,"] of the March to Finchley to Frederick the Great, and the abortive picture auction scheme, are very nearly all the notable events in the life of William Hogarth. And yet the man left a name remembered now with affection and applause, and which will be remembered, and honoured, and glorified when, to quote the self-conscious Unknown who used the Public Advertiser as a fulcrum for that terrible lever of his, "kings and ministers are forgotten, the force and direction of personal satire are no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest consequences."
By the announcement, then, that I do not contemplate, here, a complete biography of Hogarth: that I do not know enough to complete a reliable and authentic life: "nec, si sciam, dicere ausim:" these papers are to be considered but as "Mémoires pour servir;" little photographs and chalk studies of drapery, furniture, accessories of costume and snuff-box, cocked hat and silver buckle detail, all useful enough in their place and way, but quite subordinate and inferior to the grand design and complete picture of the hero. I am aware that high critical authorities have been inveighing lately against the employment of the costumiers and bric a brac shop-*keepers and inventory takers' attributes in biography; and writers are enjoined, under heavy penalties, to be, all of them, Plutarchs, and limn their characters in half a dozen broad vigorous dashes. It can conduce little, it has been argued, towards our knowledge of the Seven Years' War to be told that Frederick the Great wore a pigtail, and that to his jackboots "Day and Martin with their soot-pots were forbidden to approach;" and
