William Hogarth out of his apprenticeship is, I take it, a sturdy, ruddy-complexioned, clear-eyed, rather round-shouldered young fellow, who as yet wears his own hair, but has that sword at home—a silver-hilted or a prince’s metal one—and is not averse to giving his hat a smart cock, ay, and bordering it with a narrow rim of orrice when Fortune smiles on him. Not yet was the ἨΘΟΣ developed in him. It was there, yet latent. But, instead, that quality with which he was also so abundantly gifted, and which combined so well with his sterner faculties—I mean the quality of humorous observation—must have begun to assert itself. “Engraving on copper was at twenty years of age my utmost ambition,” he writes himself. Yes, William, and naturally so. The monsters and chimeras of heraldry and Mr. Gamble’s back-shop had by that time probably thoroughly palled on him. Fortunate if a landscape, or building, or portrait had sometimes to be engraved on a silver snuff-box or a golden fan-mount. The rest was a wilderness of apocryphal natural history, a bewildering phantasmagoria of strange devices from St. Benet’s Hill, expressed in crambo, in jargon, and in heraldic romany: compony, gobony, and chequy; lions erased and tigers couped; bucks trippant and bucks vulnèd; eagles segreiant, and dogs sciant; bezants, plates, torteaux, pomeis, golps, sanguiny-guzes, tawny and saltire.[3] The revulsion was but to be expected—was indeed inevitable, from the disgust caused by the seven years’ transcription of these catalogues of lying wonders, to the contemplation of the real life that surged about Cranbourn Alley, and its infinite variety of humours, comic and tragic. “Engraving on copper” at twenty might be the utmost ambition to a young man mortally sick of silver salvers; but how was it at twenty-one and twenty-two?