In 1726, Hogarth executed a series of plates for _Blackwell’s Military Figures_, representing the drill and manœuvres of the Honourable Artillery Company. The pike and half-pike exercise are very carefully and curiously illustrated; the figures evidently drawn from life; the attitudes very easy. The young man was improving in his drawing; for in 1724, Thornhill had started an academy for studying from the round and from life at his own house, in Covent Garden Piazza; and Hogarth—who himself tells us that his head was filled with the paintings at Greenwich and St. Paul’s, and to whose utmost ambition of scratching copper, there was now probably added the secret longing to be a historico-allegorico-scriptural painter I have hinted at, and who hoped some day to make Angels sprawl on coved ceilings, and Fames blast their trumpets on grand staircases—was one of the earliest students at the academy of the king’s sergeant painter, and member of parliament for Weymouth. Already William had ventured an opinion, _bien tranchée_, on high art. In those days there flourished—yes, flourished is the word—a now forgotten celebrity, Kent the architect, gardener, painter, decorator, upholsterer, friend of the great, and a hundred things besides. This artistic jack-of-all-trades became so outrageously popular, and gained such a reputation for taste—if a man have strong lungs, and persists in crying out that he is a genius, the public are sure to believe him at last—that he was consulted on almost every tasteful topic, and was teased to furnish designs for the most incongruous objects. He was consulted for picture-frames, drinking-glasses, barges, dining-room tables, garden-chairs, cradles, and birth-day gowns. One lady he dressed in a petticoat ornamented with columns of the five orders; to another he prescribed a copper-coloured skirt, with gold ornaments. The man was at best but a wretched sciolist; but he for a long period directed the “taste of the town.” He had at last the presumption to paint an altar-piece for the church of St. Clement Danes. The worthy parishioners, men of no taste at all, burst into a yell of derision and horror at this astounding _croûte_. Forthwith, irreverent young Mr. Hogarth lunged full butt with his graver at the daub. He produced an engraving of _Kent’s Masterpiece_, which was generally considered to be an unmerciful caricature; but which he himself declared to be an accurate representation of the picture. ’Twas the first declaration of his _guerra al cuchillo_ against the connoisseurs. The caricature, or copy, whichever it was, made a noise; the tasteless parishioners grew more vehement, and, at last, Gibson, Bishop of London (whose brother, by the way, had paid his first visit to London in the company of Dominie Hogarth), interfered, and ordered the removal of the obnoxious canvas. “Kent’s masterpiece” subsided into an ornament for a tavern-room. For many years it was to be