Hogarth has his _fièvre brulante_; and, although he painted portraits, “conversations,” and “assemblies,” to eke out that livelihood of which the chief source was the employment given him by Philip Overton, Black-Horse Bowles, and the booksellers, he continued to hanker after torsos, and flying trumpets, and wide-waving wings, and flaunting drapery, and the other paraphernalia that went to furnish forth the apotheoses of monarchs and warriors in full-bottomed wigs. This preposterous school of art has long been in hopeless decay. You see the phantom caricature of it, only, in hair-dressers’ “toilette saloons” and provincial music-halls. Timon’s villa—the futile, costly caprice—has vanished. Old Montagu House is no more. Doctor Misaubin’s house, in St. Martin’s Lane, the staircase painted by Clermont (the Frenchman asked a thousand, and actually received five hundred guineas for his work), is not within my ken. Examples of this florid, truculent style, are becoming rarer and rarer every day. Painted ceilings and staircases yet linger in some grand old half-deserted country mansions, and in a few erst gorgeous merchants’ houses in Fenchurch and Leadenhall, now let out in flats as offices and chambers. If you have no objection to hazard a crick in your neck, you may crane it, and stare upwards at the ceil-paintings at Marlborough House, in Greenwich Hall, and on Hampton Court Palace staircase. The rest has ceded before stucco and stencilled paper-hangings; and even the French, who never neglect an opportunity or an excuse for ornamentation, and who still occasionally paint the ceilings of their palaces, seem to have quite lost the old Lebrun and Coypel traditions of perspective and foreshortening—overcharged and unnatural as they were (P. P. Rubens, in the Banqueting House, Whitehall, inventor)—and merely give you a picture stuck upon a rooftree, in which the figures are attenuated vertically, instead of sprawling down upon you, isometrically upside down.