Shows, more shows, and William Hogarth walking London streets to take stock of them all, to lay them up in his memory’s ample store-house. He will turn all he has seen to good account some day. There is a show at the museum of the Royal Society, then sitting at Gresham College. The queer, almost silly things, exhibited there! queer and silly, at least to us, with our magnificent museums in Great Russell Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Brompton. I am turning over the Royal Society catalogue as I write: the rarities all set down with a ponderous, simple-minded solemnity. “Dr. Grews” is the conscientious editor. Here shall you find the “sceptre of an Indian king, a dog without a mouth; a Pegue hat and organ; a bird of paradise; a Jewish phylactery; a model of the Temple of Jerusalem; a burning-glass contrived by that excellent philosopher and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton” (hats off); “three landskips and a catcoptrick paint given by Bishop Wilkins; a gun which discharges seven times one after the other presently” (was this a revolver?); “a perspective instrument by the ingenious Sir Christopher Wren” (hats off again); “a pair of Iceland gloves, a pot of Macassar poison” (oh! Rowland); “the tail of an Indian cow worshipped on the banks of the river Ganges; a tuft of coralline; the cramp fish which by some humour or vapour benumbs the fisherman’s arms,” and so forth. Hogarth will make use of all these “curios” in the fourth scene of the _Marriage à la Mede_, and presently, for the studio of Sidrophel in his illustrations to _Hudibras_.