Had Hogarth any influence? In one way he had. He was the founder of the anecdotic school. But, in the eighteenth century, he was regarded as a satirist, as a maker of “moral pieces,” and, with a few exceptions, he won small esteem as a painter. Sir Joshua hardly mentions him, although they both lived for years in Leicester Fields, and Sir Joshua must have known his portraits well, and must often have seen the little man, twenty-six years his senior, walking within the enclosure “in a scarlet _roquelaure_ or ‘rockelo,’ with his hat cocked and stuck on one side, much in the manner of the Great Frederick of Prussia.” [Illustration: PLATE III.--MISS FENTON (In the National Gallery, London) Here we have the famous actress, Miss Lavinia Fenton, as “Polly Peachum” in the “Beggar’s Opera.” Born in 1708, she married, as his second wife, Charles Paulet, third Duke of Bolton: she died in 1760. The “Beggar’s Opera” was produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1728.] Whatever private admiration Sir Joshua may have had for Hogarth as a painter, there are few signs of it in his public utterances. Was it because “our late excellent Hogarth imprudently, or rather presumptuously, attempted the great historical style”? But Hogarth had some praise from the President in the Fourteenth Discourse, delivered on December 10, 1788, twenty-four years after Hogarth’s death. He is accredited with “extraordinary talents,” with “successful attention to the ridicule of life,” with the “invention of a new species of dramatic painting.” Lamb, dear Lamb, took up the cudgels for Hogarth even as a historical painter, arguing that “they have expression of _some sort or other_ in them. ‘The Child Moses before Pharaoh’s Daughter,’ for instance, which is more than can be said of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Repose in Egypt.’” Well, it does not matter either way. Neither Hogarth nor Sir Joshua live by their “excursions into the Holy Land.” The point I wish to labour is that the admiration of Hogarth’s contemporaries was almost entirely for his “pictur’d morals,” not for his paintings. It was his engravings that made him known; few saw the paintings, and it was only when the paintings began to be studied long after his death, that his greatness was revealed. Selections of his works were brought together in 1814, 1817, and 1862. By the latter date connoisseurs acknowledged that Hogarth “was really a splendid painter.”