Every biographer of Hogarth that I have consulted—and I take this opportunity to return my warmest thanks to the courteous book distributor at the British Museum who, so soon as he sees me enter the Reading Room, proceeds, knowing my errand, to overwhelm me with folios, and heap up barricades of eighteenth century lore round me—every one of the biographers, Nichols, Steevens, Ireland, Trusler, Phillips, Cunningham, the author of the article “Thornhill,” in the _Biographia Britannica_—the rest are mainly copyists from one another, often handing down blunders and perpetuating errors—every Hogarthian Dryasdust makes a clean leap from the hero’s birth and little schoolboy noviciate to the period of his apprenticeship to Ellis Gamble the silversmith. Refined Mr. Walpole, otherwise very appreciative of Hogarth, flirting over the papers he got from Vertue’s widow, indites some delicate manuscript for the typographers of his private press at Strawberry Hill, and tells us that the artist, whom he condescends to introduce into his _Anecdotes of Painting_, was bound apprentice to a “mean engraver of arms upon plate.” I see nothing mean in the calling which Benvenuto Cellini (they say), and Marc Antonio Raimondi (it is certain), perhaps Albert Durer, too, followed for a time. I have heard of great artists who did not disdain to paint dinner plates, soup tureens, and apothecary’s jars. Not quite unknown to the world is one Rafaelle Sanzio d’Urbino, who designed tapestry for the Flemish weavers, or a certain Flaxman, who was of great service to Mr. Wedgwood, when he began to think that platters and pipkins might be brought to serve some very noble uses. Horace Walpole, cleverest and most refined of _dilettanti_—who could, and did say the coarsest of things in the most elegant of language—you were not fit to be an Englishman. Fribble, your place was in France. Putative son of Orford, there seems sad ground for the scandal that some of Lord Fanny’s blood flowed in your veins; and that Carr, Lord Hervey, was your real papa. You might have made a collection of the great King Louis’s shoes, the heels and soles of which were painted by Vandermeulen with pictures of Rhenish and Palatinate victories. _Mignon_ of arts and letters, you should have had a _petite maison_ at Monçeaux or at the Roule. Surrounded by your _abbés au petit collet_, teacups of _pâte tendre_, fans of chicken-skin painted by Leleux or Lantara, jewelled snuff-boxes, handsome chocolate girls, gems and intaglios, the brothers to those in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, _che non si mostrano alle donne_, you might have been happy. You were good enough to admire Hogarth, but you didn’t quite understand him. He was too vigorous, downright, virile for you; and upon my word, Horace Walpole, I don’t think you understood anything belonging to England—nor her customs, nor her character, nor her constitution, nor her laws. I don’t think that you would have been anywhere more in your