The biographers who have written of artists, especially if the hero of their history was of the Dutch school, generally began by informing us that he received the rudiments of his art from the great Van A--, who was a pupil of the divine Van B--, first the disciple, and afterwards the rival, of the immortal and never enough to be admired Vander C. This _palette pedigree_ was not the boast of William Hogarth; he was the pupil,--the disciple,--the worshipper of nature! I do not learn that his family either obtained a grant of lands from our first William, or _flourished_ before the Conquest; but from Burn's History of Westmoreland, it appears that his grandfather was an honest yeoman, the inhabitant of a small tenement in the vale of Bampton, a village fifteen miles north of Kendal, and had three sons. The eldest, in conformity to ancient custom, succeeded to the _title_, _honour_, and _estate_ of his father, became a yeoman of Bampton, and proprietor of the family freehold. The second was not endowed with either land or beeves, but had in their stead a large portion of broad humour and wild original genius. Like his nephew, he grasped the whip of satire; and though his lash was not twisted with much skill, nor brandished with much grace, it was probably felt by those on whom his strokes were inflicted, more than would one of the most exquisite workmanship. He was the Shakspeare of his village, and his dramas were the delight of the country; though, being written by an uneducated yeoman, it may naturally be supposed they were sufficiently coarse. Mr. Nichols, in his Anecdotes, tells us that he has seen a whole bundle of them, and _want of grammar, metre, sense, and decency is their invariable characteristic_. This may possibly be true, for in refinement Westmoreland was many, many years behind the capital; and our libraries contain _sundrie black-letter proofs_ that those _pithie_, _pleasaunte_, and _merrie comedies_, which in the same century were _enacted by the Kingis servantes_ with universal applause, had similar _wants_; notwithstanding which, these unalloyed chronicles of our ancestors' dulness are _now_ purchased at a price considerably higher than virgin gold. Let it not from hence be imagined that I mean to sanction one folly by the mention of another; but as every human production is _relative_, if auld Hogarth, under the circumstances he wrote, was the admiration of his neighbours, we may fairly infer that his talents, properly cultivated, would, in a more polished situation, have ensured him the admiration of his contemporaries.[2]