It is certain that, William and Mary reigning, Dominic Hogart came to London, and established himself as a schoolmaster, in Ship Court, Old Bailey. He had married, as it is the wont of poor schoolmasters to do, and his wife bare him two daughters and one son. The girls were Mary and Anne; and have only to be mentioned to pass out of this record:--Who cares about Joseph Mallard Turner’s nephews and nieces? The boy, WILLIAM HOGARTH, was born on the 10th of November, 1697, and stands in the parish register of St. Bartholomew the Great, as having been baptized, November the 28th. You do not expect me to tell who nursed little chubby-baby Hogarth, whether he took to his pap kindly, and at what age he first evinced an affection for sweet-stuff? Making, however, a very early halt in his nonage, I am compelled to shake my head at a very pretty legend about him, and as prettily made into a picture, some years ago. According to this, little boy Hogarth was sent to a dame’s school, where he much vexed the good woman who boasted “unruly brats with birch to tame,” by a persistence in drawing caricatures on his slate. The picture represents him in sore disgrace, mounted on the stool of repentance, crowned with the asinine tiara of tribulation, holding in one hand the virgal rod of anguish, and in the other the slate which has brought him to this evil estate: a slate much bechalked with libellous representations of his dame. In the background is that Nemesis in a mob-cap, inflexible; around, an amphitheatre of children-spectators; the boys, as suits their boisterous character, jeering and exultant; the girls, as beseems their softer nature, scared and terrified. A very pretty, naïve picture, but apocryphal, I fear. There were no slates in dame-schools in those days. The hornbook, _Pellucid_, with its Christ Cross Row, was the beginning of knowledge, as the “baleful twig” that “frayed” the brats was the end thereof. If little boy Hogarth had been born at Kirby Thore, I would have admitted the dame-school theory in an instant; but it is far more feasible that he learnt his hornbook at his mother’s knee, and in due time was promoted to a bench in the school his father taught, and an impartial share in the stripes which the good pedagogue distributed. Nor need Dominie Hogart have been by any means a cruel pedagogue. In none of his pictures does Hogarth display any rancour against scholastic discipline (what school-scenes that pencil might have drawn!), and it generally happens that he who has suffered much in the flesh as a boy, will have a fling at the rod and the ferule when he is a man; even if he have had Orbilius for his father. And be it kept in mind, that, although the awful Busby, who called the birch “his sieve,” through which the cleverest boys must pass, and who of the Bench of Bishops taught sixteen mitred ones, was but just dead. Mr. John Locke was then also publishing his admirable treatise