The Cornhill Magazine, February, 1860 (Vol. I, No. 2)Various
General
The Cornhill Magazine, February, 1860 (Vol. I, No. 2)
Various
England -- Periodicals; English literature -- Periodicals; Short stories, English -- Periodicals
He kept a shop afterwards, and engraved tankards and salvers,
and never committed a graver act of violence than to throw a pewter
pot at the head of a ruffian who had insulted him during an outing to
Highgate. Honest man! they never sent him to Newgate or the Tower.
Only once he was clapped up for an hour or so in a Calais guardhouse,
and, coming home by the next packet-boat, took a stout revenge on the
frog-eaters with his etching needle upon copper. He was no great
traveller; and beyond the Calais ship just spoken of, does not appear
to have undertaken any journeys more important than the immortal
excursion to Rochester, of which the chronicle, illustrated by his
own sketches, is still extant, (those doughty setters-forth from the
Bedford Head were decidedly the first Pickwickians,) and a jaunt to St.
Alban’s after Culloden, to sketch the trapped fox Simon Fraser Lord
Lovat, as he sate in the inn-room under the barber’s hands, counting
the dispersed Highland clans and their available forces of caterans and
brae-men on his half-palsied, crooked, picking and stealing fingers.
William Hogarth did but one romantic thing in his life, and that was,
to run away with Sir James Thornhill’s pretty daughter; and even that
escapade soon resolved itself into a cheery, English, business-like,
house-keeping union. Papa-in-law--who painted cathedral cupolas at
forty shillings a yard--forgave William and Jane. William loved his
wife dearly--she had her tempers, and he was not a man of snow--took
a country house for her, and set up a coach when things were going
prosperously and he was Sergeant Painter to King George; and when
William (not quite a dotard, as the twin-scamps Wilkes and Churchill
called him) died, Jane made a comfortable living by selling impressions
of the plates he had engraved. These and the writing of the _Analysis
of Beauty_, the dispute concerning Sigismunda, the interest taken in
the welfare of the Foundling Hospital, the dedication [in a pique
against the king who hated “boets and bainters,”] of the _March to
Finchley_ to Frederick the Great, and the abortive picture auction
scheme, are very nearly all the notable events in the life of William
Hogarth. And yet the man left a name remembered now with affection and
applause, and which will be remembered, and honoured, and glorified
when, to quote the self-conscious Unknown who used the _Public
Advertiser_ as a fulcrum for that terrible lever of his, “kings and
ministers are forgotten, the force and direction of personal satire
are no longer understood, and measures are felt only in their remotest
consequences.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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