Born in the Old Bailey, and the ninth year of William the Dutchman, that should properly be my starting point; but the reader must first come away with me to Westmoreland, and into the Vale of Bampton--to a village sixteen miles north of Kendal and Windermere Lake. In this district had lived for centuries a family of yeomen, called Hogart or Hogard: the founder of the family, as I have hinted, may have been Hogherd, from his vocation--a guardian of swine. _His_ father, perchance, was that Gurth, the son of Beowulph, erst thrall to Cedric the Saxon, and who, after his emancipation by the worthy but irascible Franklin for good suit and service rendered in the merry greenwood, gave himself, or had given to him in pride and joy, that which he had never had before--a surname; and so, emigrating northwards, became progenitor of a free race of Hogherds. In this same Bampton Vale, the Hogarts possessed a small freehold; and of this tenement, the other rude elders being beyond my ken, the grandfather of the painter was holder in the middle of the seventeenth century. To him were three sons. The eldest succeeded to the freehold, and was no more heard of, his name being written in clods. He tilled the earth, ate of its fruits, and, his time being come, died. The two remaining sons, as the custom of Borough English did not prevail in Bampton, had to provide for themselves. Son intermediate--my William’s uncle--was a genius. Adam Walker, writer on natural philosophy, and who was the friend and correspondent of Nicholls of the _Anecdotes_, called him a “mountain Theocritus;” his contemporaries, with less elegance but more enthusiasm, dubbed him “Auld Hogart.” He was a poet, humorist, satirist, and especially a dramatist; and coarse plays of his, full of coarse fun, rough and ready action, and sarcastic hard hitting, yet linger, more by oral tradition than by any manuscript remains of his, among the Westmoreland fells. These were all written, too, in the very hardest, thickest, and broadest Westmoreland dialect; a patois to which Tim Bobbin’s Lancashire dialect is as mellifluous as the _langue d’oc_; a patois which has been compared to the speech of Demosthenes before his course of pebbles, but which, to my ears, offers more analogy to that which may have proceeded from the famous Anti-Philippian orator _during_ the pebble probation; and in order to speak which patois fluently (after the pebbles), an admirable apprenticeship is to fill your mouth as full as possible of the gritty oatcake, or “clapt bread,” which is kept in the “cratch,” or rack suspended from the ceiling in Westmoreland farmhouses. In this Scythian speech, however, “auld Hogart” concocted a famous drama, quite in the Lope de Vega’s manner, called _Troy Taken_. I do not compare the play unadvisedly with those of the prolific Spanish playwright. You know how artfully Lope’s plays begin: with what immediate action and seduction of its audience to a foregone conclusion. The curtain draws up.