Button, Purssell, at your sober warehouses the most urbane and beautiful young ladies—how pale the pasty exhalations make them!—yet dispense the most delightful of indigestions.] So he must have scraped this apprenticeship money together, Dominie Hogarth: laid it by, by cheeseparing from his meagre school fees, borrowed it from some rich scholar who pitied his learning and his poverty, or perhaps become acquainted with Ellis Gamble, who may have frequented the club held at the “Eagle and Child,” in the little Old Bailey. “A wonderful turn for limning has my son,” I think I hear Dominie Hogarth cry, holding up some precocious cartoon of William’s. “I doubt not, sir, that were he to study the humanities of the Italian bustos, and the just rules of Jesuit’s perspective, and the anatomies of the learned Albinus, that he would paint as well as Signor Verrio, who hath lately done that noble piece in the new hall Sir Christopher hath built for the blue-coat children in Newgate Street.” “Plague on the Jesuits,” answers honest (and supposititious) Mr. Ellis Gamble. “Plague on all foreigners and papists, goodman Hogarth. If you will have your lad draw bustos and paint ceilings, forsooth, you must get one of the great court lords to be his patron, and send him to Italy, where he shall learn not only the cunningness of limning, but to dance, and to dice, and to break all the commandments, and to play on the viol-di-gamby. But if you want to make an honest man and a fair tradesman of him, Master Hogarth, and one who will be a loyal subject to the Queen, and hate the French, you shall e’en bind him ’prentice to me; and I will be answerable for all his concernments, and send him to church and catechize, and all at small charges to you.” Might not such a conversation have taken place? I think so. Is it not very probable that the lad Hogarth being then some fourteen years old, was forthwith combed his straightest, and brushed his neatest, and his bundle or his box of needments being made up by the hands of his loving mother and sisters, despatched westward, and with all due solemnity of parchment and blue seal, bound ’prentice to Mr. Ellis Gamble? I am sure, by the way in which he talks of the poor old Dominie and the dictionary, that he was a loving son. I know he was a tender brother. Good Ellis Gamble—the lad being industrious, quick, and dexterous of hand—must have allowed him to earn some journeyman’s wages during his ’prentice-time; for that probation being out, he set not only himself, but his two sisters, Mary and Ann, up in business. They were in some small hosiery line, and William engraved a shop-card for them, which did not, I am afraid, prosper with these unsubstantial spinsters any more than did the celebrated lollipop emporium established in _The House with the Seven Gables_. One sister survived him, and to her, by his will, he left an annuity of eighty pounds.