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ANECDOTE BIOGRAPHY.

WILLIAM HOGARTH.

BIRTH-PLACE AND PARENTAGE OF HOGARTH.

WILLIAM HOGARTH, "the Painting Moralist," whose prints we read like books, was, in his own words, "born in the City of London, on the 10th day of November, 1697, and baptized the 28th of the same month." He was descended from the Westmoreland family of Hogard, Hogart, or Hogarth, of Kirkby Thore. Nichols states that he wrote himself Hogart or Hogard; but his father wrote his name Hogarth; and Allan Cunningham considers the concluding th, in London pronunciation, to have been hardened into t, as common in northern names with similar terminations. Thus, in conversation, he was called Hogart,* which these lines from Swift's "Legion Club" prove:

"How I want thee, humorous Hogart;
Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art!

Were but you and I acquainted,
Every monster should be painted;
You should try your graving tools
On this odious group of fools;
Draw the beasts as I describe them
From their features while I gibe them.
Draw them like, for I assure-a

You'll need no caricatur-a;

Draw them so that we may trace
All the soul in every face."

* The tradition on the Borders is, however, that the Hogarths were a Scotch family. They were always a numerous and influential race. Burke, in his Encyclopædia of Heraldry, spells the name Howgart, or Howgarth. About a century ago, the name was very common on the Scotch side of the Border; but it is now very rare. The name seems to be pronounced Hog-arth.

B

The painter's father was Richard Hogarth, the youngest of three brothers, the eldest of whom succeeded his father on a small freehold, in the Vale of Bampton. Richard was educated at Archbishop Grindal's Free School of St. Bees, in Cumberland, and subsequently settled as a schoolmaster in that county. Thence he removed to London, and there obtained employment as a corrector. of the press, or, in other words, reader at a printing-office. He married a woman, whose name or kindred is not recorded; and he next kept a school in Ship-court, on the west side of the Old Bailey, three doors from Ludgate-hill, and in the parish of St. Martin's, Ludgate. Here, it is believed, William Hogarth was born; and on the leaf of an old memorandum-book he records the time of his own birth and baptism; as quoted in the preceding page, and, as follows, of his two sisters:

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Mary Hogarth was born November 10, 1699.

Anne Hogarth, two years after in the same month.
Taken from the Register of Great St. Bartholomew's."

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It is curious to find that although Hogarth has left so many minute pictures of London localities of his own time, the place of his birth is disputed if it be Ship-court, it may be interesting to add, that nearly a century after, at the corner of the court, No. 67, three doors from Ludgate-hill, William Hone kept shop, and there published the early caricatures of George Cruikshank.*

Hogarth's father died about 1721. He appears, (from among his great son's papers, found after the painter's death,) to have been a man of scholastic attainments. To an early edition of Littleton's Latin Dictionary and Robertson's Phrases he added about four hundred closely-written pages; and on one of the leaves was inscribed, in Hogarth's (the son's) handwriting, "The nondescript part of this dictionary was the work of Mr. Richard Hogarth." He made some attempts to get his labours printed, but in vain. He then published, in 1712, "Grammar Disputations," a sort of catechism for teaching children Latin.

The present representative of the family is, or lately was, living at Clifton, near Penrith.—(Notes and Queries, 1856.)

*The occupant of the house at the corner of Ship-court, has placed over his shop-front a notice of William Hogarth having been born in the court; but it is not stated on what authority this assertion is made.

HOGARTH'S EARLY EDUCATION. HE BECOMES A
SILVER-PLATE ENGRAVER.

It is a remarkable proof of the boy's shrewdness, that at an early age, he profited by observing what was passing immediately around him. In his Anecdotes of himself, he says: "My father's pen, like that of many other authors, did not enable him to do more than put me in a way of shifting for myself. As I had naturally a good eye, and a fondness for drawing, shows of all sorts gave me uncommon pleasure when an infant; and mimicry, common to all children, was remarkable in me. An early access to a neighbouring painter, drew my attention from play; and I was, at every possible opportunity, employed in making drawings. I picked up an acquaintance of the same turn, and soon learnt to draw the alphabet with great correctness. My exercises, when at school, were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them than for the exercise itself. In the former, I soon found that blockheads, with better memories, would soon surpass me: but for the latter I was particularly distinguished.

"Besides the natural turn I had for drawing, rather than learning languages, I had before my eyes the precarious situation of men of classical education. I saw the difficulties under which my father laboured,-the many inconveniences he endured, from his dependence being chiefly on his pen; and the cruel treatment he met with from booksellers and printers, particularly in the affair of a Latin Dictionary, the compiling of which had been a work of some years. It was, therefore, conformable to my own wishes that I was taken from school, and served a long apprenticeship to a silver-plate engraver." Walpole describes him as "bound to a mean engraver of arms on plate." Hogarth probably chose this occupation, as it required some skill in drawing, which he had much cultivated. His master was Mr. Ellis Gamble, an eminent silversmith, in Cranbourne-street, Leicester Fields. In this business it was not unusual to bind apprentices to the single branch of engraving arms and ciphers on metal; and in that particular branch young Hogarth was placed. Of his age at this time there is no special record; but Nichols states the circumstance to have been verified by a simliar account from one of the 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.* Gamble's shop bore the sign of the Golden Angel; and a shop-bill engraved by his eminent apprentice is much prized by every collector of Hogarth's works. Nichols relates that during Hogarth's apprenticeship, in a Sunday excursion to Highgate, he sketched with a pencil two persons in a tavern affray, one of whom had struck the other on the head with a quart-pot; when the blood running down the man's face, the agony of the wound distorted it into a hideous grin, which Hogarth drew with ludicrous effect, although the portraits of both antagonists were exact likenesses, and the surrounding figures were caricatured with equal fidelity.

On a later occasion he strolled, with Hayman the painter, into a cellar, where two women were quarrelling in their cups. One of them filled her mouth with brandy, and spirted it dexterously in the eyes of her antagonist. "See! see!" said Hogarth, taking out his tablets and sketching her," look at the brimstone's mouth." This virago figures in Modern Midnight Conversation.

"LITTLE HOGARTH."

Nichols records that, about this time, Hogarth was very poor. "Being one day distressed to raise so trifling a sum as twenty shillings, in order to be revenged of his landlady, who strove to compel him to payment, he drew her as ugly as possible, and in that single portrait gave marks of the dawn of superior genius." Nichols, however, doubts this story, since it was never related by Hogarth, who was always fond of contrasting the necessities of his youth with the affluence of his maturer age. He has been heard to say of himself: "I remember the time when I have gone moping into the city with scarce a shilling in my pocket; but as soon as I had received ten guineas there for a plate, I have returned home, put on my sword, and sallied out again, with all the confidence of a man who had ten thousand pounds in his pocket.” "Let me add," says Nichols, "that my first authority may be to the full as good as my second."

J. T. Smith relates, in Nollekens and his Times, that his father once asked Barry, the painter, if he had ever seen Hogarth. "Yes, once,” he replied. "I was walking with Joe Nollekens through Cranbourne-alley, when he exclaimed,

*

Biographical Anecdotes of William Hogarth. Second Edition. Printed by and for J. Nichols, 1782.

'There, there's Hogarth.' 'What!' said I, 'that little man in the sky-blue coat?' Off I ran, and though I lost sight of him only for a moment or two, when I turned the corner into Castle-street, he was patting one of two quarrelling boys on the back, and looking stedfastly at the expression in the coward's face, he cried, 'D-n him! if I would take it of him; at him again !'"

HOGARTH'S ENGRAVED SILVER-PLATE.

Panton Betew, the silversmith, and dealer in works of art, in Old Compton-street, Soho, was intimate with Hogarth, and frequently purchased pieces of plate with armorial bearings. engraved upon them by Hogarth, which he cleared out for the next possessor, but, unfortunately, without rubbing off a single impression. This was not the case with Morison, a silversmith of Cheapside: he took twenty-five impressions off a large silver dish, engraved by Hogarth, which impressions he not only numbered, as they were taken off, but attested each with his own signature. "Should," says J. T. Smith, in relating the above, "this page meet the eye of any branches of the good old-fashioned families, which have carefully preserved the plate of Oliver their uncle, or Deborah their aunt, I sincerely implore them, should the armorial bearings be the productions of the early part of the last century, to cause a few impressions to be taken from them; for I am inclined to believe it very possible that some curious specimens of Hogarth's drawing genius may yet in that way be rescued from future furnaces." Some beautiful specimens of Hogarth's metal engraving and chasing are in existence. At Strawberry Hill, before the Sale in 1842, was a magnificent silver-gilt Plateau, with medallions of George I., the Royal Arms, figures of Britannia and Justice, and a view of the City of London, and allegorical devices, exquisitely engraved by Hogarth. (See Catalogue, eleventh day's sale, lot 120.)

UNIQUE PRINT FROM AN ENGRAVING BY HOGARTH. In a pleasant little book, entitled A Pinch of Snuff, published in 1840, it is related that "Some time since a gentleman sent his snuff-box to a working jeweller for repair, the embossed frame which surrounded the lid having become loose; the box was of silver, plain shaped, but ornamented on the top with a group of figures, somewhat after the manner of Watteau, engraved upon the plate. Upon removing the

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