Where is that altar-piece now? Mr. Wheatly says in his “Hogarth’s London” that it was “occasionally taken to the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand for exhibition at the music meetings of the churchwardens of the parish.” They had strange enjoyments in the worst-mannered period in our history. Poor Kent! I try to plead for him. But it is difficult to be enthusiastic. He was chosen to supply (delightful word that, supply!) the statue of Shakespeare for the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. There it remains. It is no better than the marble effigies in the mason’s gardens in the Euston Road. Kent as an architect! There, surely, we have something sure and admirable. Holkam in Norfolk, Devonshire House in Piccadilly, and the Horse Guards are stated to be his work. That the Horse Guards from the park is a noble pile nobody can doubt, but is it all Kent’s? His hand also may be traced inside Devonshire House. Mr. Francis Lenygon, Kent’s modern champion, says that the two state apartments in Devonshire House are “certainly the finest in London, even if they can be surpassed in any palace in Europe.” Lord Burlington was Kent’s champion during his lifetime. He met him when the “arbiter of taste” was thirty-two, and gave him apartments in his town house, now the Royal Academy, for the remainder of his life. Kent came through. Hogarth, try as he would, could not wreck him. He died Master Carpenter to the King and Keeper of Pictures, and he left a fortune. Kent came through. The man must have had extraordinary gifts of persuasion and power, hinted at by his biographers when they speak of his winning manners and gracious ways. I see nothing of charm in his portrait by Dandridge; but Dandridge was no psychologist. He looks pompous; Hogarth looks pugnacious; so they remain in death as in life; but their rivalry is over. Everybody recognises Hogarth as the “father of English painting”; let us be kind to Kent, and cherish him as the “father of modern gardening.” Walpole called him that. The ascription will offend nobody, not even Hogarth. To that magnificent Londoner gardens were nought except perhaps the garden of his villa at Chiswick. V HOGARTH AS PAINTER The versatility of Hogarth’s genius is a recurring surprise. His satires and moralities seem natural, the unforced expression of his vigorous, observant nature. Natural, too, seem the less inspired of his portraits, and the Conversation Pieces which employed the early years of his life; but the technical qualities of the best of his portraits and groups, and passages in the Progresses, are a recurring surprise. “The Harlot’s Progress” was finished in his thirty-fourth year. The paintings of this series “were consumed in the fire which burnt down Mr. Beckford’s house at Fonthill in 1755,” although there seems to be some doubt if all six pictures were destroyed.