IV.—THE PAINTER’S PROGRESS. About the year of grace 1727 the world began to hear of William Hogarth, not only as a designer and engraver of pasquinades and book-plates, but as a painter in oils. He had even begun to know what patronage was; and it was, doubtless, not without a reason that his _Hudibras_ series was dedicated to “William Ward, Esquire, of Great Houghton, Northamptonshire.” In his early heraldic days, I find that he was once called upon to engrave an “Apollo in all his glory, azure.” He probably copied the figure from some French print; but in 1724 he was hard at work copying Apollo, and Marsyas to boot, at Thornhill’s Academy. Although he was sensible enough not to neglect the cultivation of the main chance, and with all convenient speed betook himself to the profitable vocation of portraiture or “face painting;” obtaining almost immediately, from his connection with the king’s sergeant painter, some aristocratic commissions—it is curious to observe that the young man’s bent lay in the direction of the historico-allegorical, then running neck-and-neck with the upholstery style of adornment. He had the epic-fever. Who among us has not suffered from that _fièvre brulante_—that generous malady of youth? How many contented sub-editors and quiet booksellers’ readers do we not know, who, in their hot adolescence, came to town, their portmanteaus bursting with the “Somethingiad,” in twenty-four cantos, or with blank-verse tragedies running to the orthodox five acts? Stipple, the charming domestic painter; Jonquil, who limns flowers and fruits so exquisitely, commenced with their enormous cartoons and show-clock oil-pictures: “Orestes pursued by the Eumenides,” “Departure of Regulus,”—_la vieille patraque_, in short—the old, heroic, impossible undertakings. And did not Liston imagine that he was born to play _Macbeth_? and did not Douglas Jerrold project a treatise on Natural Philosophy? and where is the little boarding-school miss that has not dreamt of riding in a carriage with a coronet on the panels, and being called her ladyship? Amina thinks the grandiloquent music of _Norma_ would suit her; the maiden speech of young Quintus Briscus is a tremendous outburst against ministers. Quintus is going to shake the country, and cut the Gordian knot of red-tape. The session after next he will be a junior Lord of the Treasury, the demurest and most complacent of placemen. Peers, politicians, pamphleteers, and players: we all find our level. Rolling about the board is not to be tolerated for any length of time: we _must_ peg in somewhere, and happy the man who finds himself in the right hole, and is satisfied with that state of life into which it has pleased heaven to call him!