“There is to be seen at Mr. Hocknes, at the Maremaid, near the King's Bench, in Southwark, during the time of the Fair, A Changeling Child, being A Living Skeleton, Taken by a Venetian Galley from a Turkish Vessel in the Archipelago. This was a fairy child, supposed to be born of Hungarian parents, but changed in the nursery; aged 9 years and more, not exceeding a foot and a half high. The legs and arms so very small, that they scarcely exceed the bigness of a man's thumb; and the face no bigger than the palm of one's hand. She is likewise a mere anatomy.”--Temp. W. 3. ** “Sept. 12, 1729.--At Reynold's Great Theatrical Booth, in the Half-Moon Inn, near the Bowling-Green, Southwark, during the Fair will be presented the Beggar's Wedding,--Southwark Fair, or the Sheep-Shearing,--an opera called Flora,--and The Humours of Harlequin.” Southwark, or Lady Fair, has long since been suppressed. Thanks, however, to the “great painter of mankind,” that we can hold it as often as we please in our own breakfast-parlours and drawing-rooms! The works of Hogarth are medicines for melancholy. If the mood be of Jacques's quality, “a most humorous sadness,” it will revel in the master's whim; if of a deeper tinge, there is the dark side of the picture for mournful reflection. Though an unsparing satirist, probing vice and folly to the quick, he has compassion for human frailty and sorrow. He is no vulgar caricaturist, making merry with personal deformity; he paints wickedness in its true colours, and if the semblance be hideous, the original, not the copy, is to blame. His scenes are faithful transcripts of life, high and low. He conducts us into the splendid saloons of fashion;--we pass with him into the direst cells of want and misery. He reads a lesson to idleness, extravagance, and debauchery, such as never was read before. He is equally master of the pathetic and the ludicrous. He exhibits the terrible passions, and their consequences, with almost superhuman power. Every stroke of his pencil points a moral; every object, however insignificant, has its meaning. His detail is marvellous, and bespeaks a mind pregnant with illustration, an eye that nothing could escape. Bysshe's Art of Poetry, the well-chalked tally, the map of the gold mines, and the starved cur making off with the day's lean provision, are in perfect keeping with the distressed poet's ragged finery, his half-mended breeches, and all the exquisite minutiae of his garret. His very wig, most picturesquely awry, is a happy symbol of poetical and pecuniary perplexity. Of the same marking character are the cow's horns, rising just above the little citizen's head, in the print of “_Evening_,” telling a sly tale; while the _dramatis personae_ of the Strollers' Barn, the flags, paint-pots, pageants, clouds, waves, puppets, dark-lanterns, thunder, lightning, daggers, periwigs, crowns,