A man in a cloak crosses the stage. A masked cavalier rushes after him with a drawn sword. There is a _rixe_ at once established; the audience begin to imagine all sorts of terrible things, and the success of the piece is half assured. So “auld Hogart’s” play of _Troy Taken_, begins with a _rixe_. Paris is seen in the very act of running away with Helen; and Menelaus runs after them, calling “Stop thief!” With such an auspicious commencement, and plenty of good boisterous episodes throughout: Hector dragged about by the heels; Thersites cudgelled within an inch of his life; Achilles storming for half an hour at the loss of Patrocles, and a real wooden horse to finish up with: the whole spiced with “auld Hogart’s” broadest jokes: who can wonder that _Troy Taken_ achieved immense popularity, and that years after the death of the facetious author, natural philosopher Adam Walker saw the piece performed from recollection by the Troutbeck rustics, the stage a greensward, the auditorium a grassy knoll, the canopy, Heaven? The proceedings were inaugurated by a grand cavalcade, headed by the minstrels of five parishes, and a lusty yeoman mounted on a bull’s back and playing on the fiddle; and as a prologue to _Troy Taken_, there was a pilgrimage of the visitors to a stone dropped by the enemy of mankind in an unsuccessful attempt to build a bridge across Windermere! The brother of the “auld” dramatist of the _Iliad_, and third son of the Bampton yeoman, was Richard Hogart. Without being dogmatical, I trust that I am justified in the assumption that the “liquefaction” of the patronymic into Hogarth was due partly to the more elegant education of this yeoman’s son, partly to our painter’s formation of a “genteel” connection, when he married Jane Thornhill. I have not seen his indentures; and take the authority of Ireland for the registry of his birth; but it is certain that he was at one period called,--ay, and pretty well known--as Hogart: witness Swift, in his hideously clever satire of the _Legion Club_:-- “How I want thee, hum’rous Hogart, Thou, I hear, a pleasant rogue art”--