There was the memory of his father, school-master and corrector for the press in Ship Court, Old Bailey, whose little son, great William, was born in Bartholomew Close and baptized at the church of Bartholomew the Great. There was his apprenticeship to the silver-plate engraver Ellis Gamble; the development of his technical memory for the forms of things; his growing power of swift drawing; his first prints; his lawsuit against Morris, which was practically to prove to the world that he was a painter as well as an engraver; his runaway marriage with the daughter of Sir James Thornhill; the success of the Progresses; his fight with the pirates; his scorn of conventional connoisseurship; the visit of this hardened Britisher to France, where “he pooh-poohed the houses, the furniture, the ornaments, and in the streets was often clamorously rude”; his serio-comic arrest at Calais; his progress in art and reputation; the house in Leicester Fields; his appointment as Sergeant Painter; his quarrel with Wilkes and Churchill--all the vicissitudes of that full, fighting, hard-working, outstanding life; and now--is this the last journey? “What will be the subject of your next print?” a friend asked Hogarth. “The End of All Things!” was his reply. That “Bathos” plate was prophetical. Well, the journey is over. He has arrived in Leicester Fields. That night, going to bed, “he was seized with a vomiting, upon which he rang his bell with such violence that he broke it [that was so like Hogarth], and expired about two hours afterwards.” His house, the last but two on the east side of Leicester Square, became later the smaller half of the Sablonière, or Jaquier’s Hotel. It is now Archbishop Tenison’s school. From the windows you look down upon the white bust by Joseph Durham, lean and watchful, that stands in a corner of modern, spruce Leicester Square. I should like to see carved upon the bust the characteristic concluding passage of Hogarth’s disjointed autobiography:-- “This I can safely attest, I have invariably endeavoured to make those about me tolerably happy, and my greatest enemy cannot say I ever did an intentional injury: though, without ostentation, I could produce many instances of men that have been essentially benefited by me. What may follow, God knows.” We know what has followed in this world--acknowledgment, admiration, the title of the Father of British Painting, and the example of a man who endured to the end, which is the most difficult of all the enterprises of life. For the end approaches to most of us when we are weakest. Hogarth broke the bell-rope. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hogarth, by C. Lewis Hind