In disjointed language, but with a very earnest purpose, I have endeavoured to trace our painter’s Prelude,—the growth of his artistic mind, the ripening of his perceptive faculties under the influence of the life he saw. Now, for the operation of observation, distilled in the retort of his quaint humour. I record the work he did; and first, in 1720, mention “four drawings in Indian ink” of the characters at Button’s coffee-house.[7] In these were sketches of Arbuthnot, Addison, Pope (as it is conjectured), and a certain Count Viviani, identified years afterwards by Horace Walpole, when the drawings came under his notice. They subsequently came into Ireland’s possession. Next Hogarth executed an etching, whose subject was of more national importance. In 1720-21, as all men know, England went mad, and was drawn, jumping for joy, into the Maëlstrom of the South Sea bubble. France had been already desperately insane, in 1719, and Philip, the Regent, with John Law of Lauriston, the Edinburgh silversmith’s son, who had been rake, bully, and soldier, and had stood his trial for killing Beau Wilson in a duel, had between them gotten up a remarkable mammon-saturnalia in the Palais Royal and the Rue Quincampoix. Law lived _en prince_ in the Place Vendôme. They show the window now whence he used to look down upon his dupes. He died, a few years after the bursting of his bubble, a miserable bankrupt adventurer at Venice. And yet there really was something tangible in his schemes, wild as they were. The credit of the Royal Bank averted a national bankruptcy in France, and some substantial advantage might have been derived from the Mississippi trade. At all events, there actually was such a place as Louisiana. In this country, the geographical actualities were very little consulted. The English South Sea scheme was a swindle, _pur et simple_. Almost everybody in the country caught this cholera-morbus of avarice. Pope dabbled in S. S. S. (South Sea Stock): Lady Mary Wortley Montague was accused of cheating Ruremonde, the French wit, out of 500_l._ worth of stock. Ladies laid aside ombre and basset to haunt ’Change Alley. Gay “stood to win” enormous sums—at one time imagined himself, as did Pope also, to be the “lord of thousands,” but characteristically refused to follow a friend’s advice to realize at least sufficient to secure himself a “clean shirt and a shoulder of mutton every day for life.” He persisted in holding, and lost all. Mr. Aislabie, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was deeply implicated in S. S. S. transactions, as were also many peers and members of parliament. The amiable and accomplished Craggs, the postmaster-general, the friend of all the wits, and for whose tomb Pope wrote so touching an epitaph, tarnished his reputation indelibly by unscrupulous jobbery. He died of the small-pox, just in time to avoid disgrace and ruin; but his poor old father was sold up, and was borne to the grave shortly afterward, broken-hearted.