VI. Some Pictures in National Collections 57 VII. The Soane Museum and Foundling Hospital 66 VIII. The “Villakin” at Chiswick, and the End 73 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Plate I. The Shrimp Girl Frontispiece In the National Gallery, London Page II. Hogarth’s Sister 14 In the National Gallery, London III. Miss Fenton 24 In the National Gallery, London IV. James Quin 34 In the National Gallery, London V. Marriage à la Mode 40 In the National Gallery, London VI. Sarah Malcolm 50 In the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh VII. Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, 1666-1747 60 In the National Portrait Gallery, London VIII. Peg Woffington 70 In Sir Edward Tennant’s Collection I AN AUCTION AND A CONVERSATION The auction was proceeding leisurely and without excitement. It was an “off day.” I was present because these pictures of the Early British School included a “Conversation Piece” ascribed to Hogarth, and a medley of prints after him, worn impressions, the vigour gone, merely the skeletons of his bustling designs remaining. They fetched trivial prices: they were not the real thing. And there was little demand for the portraits by half-forgotten limners of the period, portraits of dull gentlemen in eighteenth-century costume, examples of wooden Thomas Hudson, famous as the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of such mediocrities as Knapton and Shackleton. Yet they evoked a sort of personal historical interest, recreating, as portrait after portrait passed before our eyes, the level highway of art of those days before Hogarth delivered it from the foreign thraldom.