tion, and when, at last, he was found sketching the English arms upon the famous old gate of Calais (now no longer standing), he was at once taken before the commandant for a spy, confined closely in his lodgings, and finally escorted, with scant ceremony, on shipboard for England. He revenged himself upon his return for this ignominious treatment by the picture of the ‘Gate of Calais,’ in which the gluttonous friars, the leathern-faced fishwomen, and the ‘lean, ragged, and tawdry soldiery’ were pilloried to his heart's content. Another well-worn anecdote may be quoted in illustration of his sturdy independence of character. Upon one occasion he painted a deformed nobleman, and drew his likeness faithfully. His sitter, who had anticipated flattery, declined to accept it. Thereupon Hogarth announced that if it were not removed within three days, it would, with certain uncomplimentary appendages, be disposed of to Mr. Hare, ‘the famous wild-beast man,’ a hint which at once brought about a settlement of his claim (Genuine Works, 1808, i. 25). A third story related by Nichols pleasantly exemplifies that pardonable vanity which was almost a natural consequence of his self-reliant nature. ‘Hogarth,’ says the narrator, ‘being at dinner with the great Cheselden, and some other company, was told that Mr. John Freke, surgeon of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, a few evenings before, at Dick's Coffee-house, had asserted that Greene was as eminent in composition as Handel. “That fellow Freke,” replied Hogarth, “is always shooting his bolt absurdly one way or another! Handel is a giant in music; Greene only a light Florimel kind of a composer.” “Ay,” says our artist's informant, “but at the same time Mr. Freke declared you were as good a portrait-painter as Vandyck.” “There he was in the right,” adds Hogarth, “and so I am, give me my time, and let me choose my subject”’ (ib. i. 237). He was often extremely absent-minded. Once, when he had gone to call upon the lord mayor, Beckford, in the fine coach which he set up in his later years, and for which Catton, the coach painter, designed the emblematical crest engraved by Livesay in 1782, he forgot all about it on leaving the house, and to the amazement of his wife arrived at home on foot, and drenched to the skin (ib. i. 216–17).
The list of Hogarthiana might easily be extended. With regard to some of the well-known stories, it will be well to cross-question their sources rather narrowly. Not a few of those which have a more than ordinarily malicious turn emanate from George Steevens, who, as Allan Cunningham says, ‘seems to have taken pleasure in mingling his own gall with the milk of his coadjutor's narrative.’ In the edition of 1808–17 the portions respectively supplied by the two commentators are distinguished, and it is manifest that all the more unfriendly comments and records belong not to Nichols, but to Steevens. The unmanly and indefensible attack of the latter (Biog. Anecdotes, 1785, pp. 113–14) upon Mary Lewis, whose only fault appears to have been her loyalty to her uncle's memory, is almost sufficient to disqualify him as a chronicler. Another critic who has been unduly harsh to certain aspects of Hogarth's character is Horace Walpole. From a clever letter to George Montagu, dated 5 May 1761, it is clear that, however he may have appreciated his powers as a pictorial satirist, Walpole ranked him as a man with the rest of those outsiders of fashion, the Fieldings, Goldsmiths, Johnsons, &c., whose misfortune it was to be born beyond the pale of his own patrician circle, and that, even in the domain of art, he resented his claim to be a colourist, a portrait-painter, or a critic.
With respect to the last-named qualification—as far at least as it is exemplified by ‘The Analysis’—the consensus of modern opinion would probably be in accord with Walpole. ‘The Analysis’ was the tour de force of a clever artist, whose gifts, as he himself admitted, lay more with the pencil than the pen. But when Dr. Morell and others, echoing Walpole and ‘the picture dealers, picture cleaners, picture-frame makers, and other connoisseurs’—to use Hogarth's scornful classification—declared that ‘colouring was not his forte,’ they did him imperfect justice. Since the first exhibition of his collected works in oil at the British Institution in 1814, his reputation as a mere layer of colours has been steadily increasing, and the reaction thus initiated has been enforced of late years by the appearance, in successive exhibitions at the Academy and elsewhere, of numerous portraits and pictures long buried in private collections. It is now admitted that his merits as a painter are unquestionable, that his tints are pure and harmonious, his composition perspicuous, and his manner, without being minute or finely finished, singularly dexterous and direct. Even the much-abused ‘Sigismunda’ is now held at present to be a far better work than would ever be suspected from the gross obloquy to which, owing to the circumstances of its production, it was exposed during the artist's lifetime. If it cannot be ranked (as he fondly hoped) with Correggio, it must at least be conceded that its scheme of colour is sound and its technical skill by no means contemptible.
As to his engravings they are so well
