And I am yet in the year 1697, and in the Old Bailey with a child in my arms. Were this an honest plain-sailing biography, now, what would be easier for me than to skip the first twelve or thirteen years of the boy’s life, assume that he got satisfactorily through his teething, thrush, measles, and chicken-pox perils, and launch him comfortably, a chubby lad, in the midst of the period of which the ruthless Doctor Swift will write a history--the last four years of the reign of Queen Anne--and make up his little bundle for him, ready for his apprenticeship to Mr. Ellis Gamble, silver-plate engraver of Cranbourne Alley, Leicester Fields. He may have been sent out to nurse at Tottenham or Edmonton, or, may be, distant Ware, as children of his degree were wont to be sent out (Mr. John Locke’s _Education_, and Mr. Daniel Defoe’s _Family Instructor, passim_). But, in good sooth, I am loth to turn over my William to the tender mercies of the eighteenth century and the Augustan age. I fear great “Anna” and her era, and for a double reason: first, that people know already so much about the reign of Queen Anne. No kindly book a’ bosom but can follow Sir Roger de Coverley and his tall silent friend the _Spectator_ in their rambles; but has seen Swift walking across the park in mighty fear of the Mohocks; but has taken a dish of coffee at Miss Vanhomrigh’s; but has lounged in the elegant saloon, among the China monsters and the black boys, with Belinda or Sir Plume; but has accompanied Steele from coffee-house to coffee-house, and peeped over his shoulder while he scribbled those charming little billets to his wife; but has seen Queen Anne herself, the “stately lady in black velvet and diamonds,” who touched little Sam Johnson for the evil, and hung round his neck that broad piece of angel gold, which in its more earthly form of a guinea the poor doctor wanted so often and so badly at a subsequent stage of his career. The humorists and essayists of Queen Anne’s days have made them as crystal-clear to us as Grammont and Pepys made those of the Second Charles; and--there! bah! it is mock modesty to blink the truth because my pen happens to be enlisted under such a banner. I could have gone swaggeringly enough into all the minutiæ of Anne’s days, all the glories and meannesses of John Churchill, all the humours, and tyrannies, and quarrels of Pope, and Gay, and Harley, and St. John, if a book called _Esmond_ had never been written. Yet finding myself in this cleft stick, between the historian who wrote of the state of manners at the close of the reign of Charles II., and the novelist, who has made the men and women of Queen Anne’s court and city and army live again, I feel slightly relieved. There is just one little niche left for me. Just three years to dwell upon, while little boy Hogarth is in his swaddling clothes, or is consorting with divers other little brats as diminutive as he, on the doorsteps or the pavement of Ship Court.