WILLIAM HOGARTH was born in 1697 in Ship Court, Old Bailey, hard by Ludgate Hill, in a house which was pulled down in 1862. His father, who had received a good education at St. Bees, kept a school in Ship Court, and sought work from booksellers. But, like many another poor scholar, he could not make a living, and died disappointed. After spending some time at school, William Hogarth, warned by the example of his father, determined to pursue a craft in preference to literature, and was apprenticed, probably in 1711, to Ellis Gamble, a silversmith in Cranbourne Alley. Here, though his drawings and engravings were mostly confined to heraldic devices and the like, the young artist gained accuracy of touch, to which he added truthfulness of design, and prepared himself to delineate that London life which was to furnish him with models for his art. He tells us how he determined to enter a wider field than that of mere silver-plate engraving, though at the age of twenty to engrave his own designs on copper was the height of his ambition. The men and women who jostled him in London streets, or rolled by him in their coaches, were his models. Besides the keenest powers of observation, and a sardonic, sympathizing, and pitying humour, he possessed a wonderfully accurate and retentive memory, which enabled him to impress a face or form on his mind, and reproduce it at leisure. Occasionally, if some very attractive or singular face struck his fancy, he would sketch it on his thumb-nail, and thence transfer it. Hogarth tells us that "instead of burdening the memory with musty rules, or tiring the eye with copying dry or damaged pictures, I have ever found studying from nature the shortest and safest way of obtaining knowledge of my art." Thus, whether he was watching "society" on its way to court, or mingling in the midnight orgies of a tavern, Hogarth was storing portraits which were to appear, some in silks and satins, as in the _Marriage a la Mode_, others among the humours of _Beer Street_ and the misery of _Gin Lane_. Hogarth's apprenticeship ended probably in 1718; we find him studying drawing from the life in the Academy in St. Martin's Lane. In 1721 he published _An Emblematical Print on the South Sea (Scheme)_, which was sold at one shilling a copy, and though defective in the sardonic humour which marked his later works, shows promise of what was to come. In the same year _The Lottery_ was published. In 1724 he engraved _Masquerades and Operas_, a satire, which represents "society" crowding to a masquerade, and led by a figure wearing a cap and bells on his head, and the Garter on his leg. This engraving delighted the public whom it satirised, and Hogarth lost much through piracies of his work. He was employed by the booksellers to illustrate books with engravings and frontispieces. In "Mottraye's Travels" (1723) there are eighteen illustrations by Hogarth, seven in the "Golden Ass of Apuleius" (1724), and five frontispieces in