I do not think you will drop a tear. I do not think Hogarth’s “pictur’d morals” will ever correct your heart; but you may in passing meditate upon the differences in epitaphs throughout the world--this on Hogarth’s tomb, for example, and that in a German churchyard copied by a chance pilgrim:-- “I will awake, O Christ, when Thou callest me, but let me sleep a little, for I am very tired.” Tearless, heart uncorrected, yet you will uncover before the “honour’d dust” of the Father of English Painting, forthright and forcible, who endured to the end, and whose name is imperishable. Then you pass on up Hogarth Lane to the “villakin,” no longer in fields open to the country and the river, but amidst a multitude of little dwellings and little streets, noisy with children and the rumble of infrequent traffic. The narrow, Georgian, red-brick house, the “villakin,” stands in a garden surrounded by a high wall. There, in the quiet, empty, memory-haunted house, the spirit of Hogarth may be truly evoked. This place where the dead live is preserved, tended, and open to the public through the generosity of Colonel Shipway, who, in 1902, “presented it to the nation and to the Art World in memory of the Genius that once lived and worked within its walls.” Happy work, for in Hogarth’s time Chiswick was fresh and green, and the panelled rooms of his summer lodging were reposeful, and there was, and is, a hanging, projecting bay window on the first floor overlooking the garden, where he would sit and talk with his friends, with Garrick, and Fielding, and Townley, and plan and scheme diatribes in print and pencil, and invent pictorial chronicles. The green space is smaller than it was, and the studio has been pulled down, but the garden is well tended and secluded. Four of the large trees, including the hawthorn where the nightingales sang, are gone, but the ancient mulberry still remains, with the fruit of which Hogarth was wont to regale the children of rural Chiswick. Gone is the tomb of Pompey the dog; and the stone with the carving recording the death of Dick the bullfinch, inscribed with his own hand, “Alas! poor Dick! 1760. Aged 11,” has also disappeared.